tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66812404578285986762024-03-06T00:46:49.016+13:00DistractionsQuardle oodle ardle wardle doodleChris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.comBlogger219125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-86365667286126682952015-11-11T11:17:00.001+13:002015-11-13T17:49:50.128+13:00Bach played the blues<p><strong><a href="http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-kg8XhyUoTWk/VkJs9mcRtiI/AAAAAAAAFqc/owGh6oWJOwk/s1600-h/Toussaint%252520Motion%25255B5%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Toussaint Motion" border="0" alt="Toussaint Motion" align="left" src="http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-kJEqhtTb7OM/VkJs-ewt9bI/AAAAAAAAFqk/Lo06e6oA0dE/Toussaint%252520Motion_thumb%25255B6%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="210" height="316" /></a>Allen Toussaint</strong> was a gentleman: the way he carried himself, and every note he played. The much-loved New Orleans pianist, composer, producer and arranger, who unexpectedly died of a heart attack this week aged 77, also carried the history of his city’s music inside him. It had not just a rich past but an exciting future. </p> <p>He was gracious and humble, always preferring to bring out the best in other performers rather than take the limelight. A stalwart of the city’s R&B since the late 1950s, he made only a few solo albums (1972’s <em>Life, Love and Faith </em>and 1975’s  <em>Southern Nights </em>are especially recommended) and rarely gave performances. But each year he had a showcase spot at the Jazz & Heritage Festival, and with good humour and a great groove he performed the hits he wrote for others. He was a tentative singer, but that was more his personality than a limitation, and to hear the familiar songs performed by their composer gave them extra depth and heart. On stage, he would often wear lurid, sequinned outfits, showing another side of his character, but he would bring forward the musicians he had hired for the one-off, highly rehearsed gigs, preferring to share the spotlight.</p> <p>He seemed to be ubiquitous in New Orleans, wandering around the Jazzfest grounds immaculately dressed in a bespoke suit and leather sandals, his trimmed moustache and formal graces giving him the air of a black Clark Gable. He was the prince of the Crescent City. I was taken to see the New Orleans Symphony – a son of Shostakovich was conducting – and Toussaint was in a box in the circle, like he was holding court; he was the orchestra’s patron. It seemed appropriate – he was courtly – but he was just at home in a dirt-floor juke joint like the Dew Drop Inn where he started out. </p> <p>I only met him once, and sadly it wasn’t for an interview. I was walking through New Orleans in April 1989 – Royal Street in the French Quarter – when I spotted a Rolls-Royce with the number plate PIANO. The Rolls was stuck in traffic in the narrow street, and as I got closer I saw it was Allen Toussaint at the wheel. I had my camera in my hand – for the number plate – and the electric window slid down. </p> <p><a href="http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-UpJWHXCMHp0/VkJs_ZtfB5I/AAAAAAAAFqs/Qp3kULVz0lg/s1600-h/Toussaint%252520car%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 6px 0px 6px 10px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: right; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Toussaint car" border="0" alt="Toussaint car" align="right" src="http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-LzzCIHMLfJ4/VkJtARZ0e1I/AAAAAAAAFq0/vvMJ-eriDfY/Toussaint%252520car_thumb%25255B2%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="274" height="192" /></a>“Did you want to take a photo?” he said with a grin. “Yes please, Mr Toussaint,” I said. “I saw your concert last night – it was wonderful.” <br />“Thank you,” he replied. “Did you want me in the car or out of the car?”</p> <p>I was stunned, and before I answered he had a quick word into the brick of a phone wired into the dashboard, and stepped out. He put on a jacket, to complete his silver suit – with a tie, of course – and posed with a straight back standing beside the Rolls-Royce grill and number plate. I got down on one knee and took a vertical photo; the moment I clicked the shutter I realised the late afternoon shadows on his face would make it underexposed. There wasn’t enough time to get a flash to warm up; I thanked him, said I worked for a New Zealand music magazine called <i>Rip It Up</i> and gave him a card. He responded with another big grin, said “Wonderful”, got back in his car and glided off when the light turned green. A brief encounter, but it told so much about his character. (He also had a car with the plate SONGS, pictured above; the photo I took is below.)</p> <p>It was only when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, and he had to abandon his flooded New Orleans home – which contained his archives, destroyed – that he won more of a national profile in the US. This, despite writing hits such as ‘Mother-in-Law’ and ‘Fortune Teller’ in the 1960s, ‘On Your Way Down’ and ‘Sneaking Sally in the Alley’ and – a special favourite – ‘What Do You Want the Girl to Do’ in the 1970s. In that decade, countless mainstream artists came to him to be produced – Robert Palmer, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Joe Cocker – with the Meters often the backing band. And the Band came calling when they wanted the horns arranged for the <i>Rock of Ages </i>and <i>Last Waltz </i>concerts. His greatest albums for others are probably <i>Yes We Can </i>– which he wrote and produced for Lee Dorsey, his favoured singer – and Dr John’s two mid-70s classics, <i>In the Right Place </i>and <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGArmwzJdg0">Desitively Bonnaroo</a>. </i></p> <p><a href="http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ihCW3XoByQg/VkJtBO3EKCI/AAAAAAAAFq8/uz6E4x0GaUA/s1600-h/Toussaint%252520sandals%25255B6%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Toussaint sandals" border="0" alt="Toussaint sandals" align="left" src="http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-YFKYrK_6_rw/VkJtCFMHZSI/AAAAAAAAFrE/e1nZ9kVxcCk/Toussaint%252520sandals_thumb%25255B6%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="286" height="298" /></a>Homeless after Katrina, he settled in New York for a while and started playing a lot more gigs, made an album with Elvis Costello (with whom he had worked in the 80s), plus an excellent album of local <a href="https://youtu.be/qNAp0igLZIs">jazz standards</a>, and devoted a lot of time and energy to rebuilding his beloved home town. </p> <p>Toussaint stands alongside Louis Armstrong as one of the giants of New Orleans music. His influences were omnivorous: Bach, Gottschalk, Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, also Haitian and Cuban music. He was a scholar of the piano, and an exquisite performer. You can hear the history of New Orleans in his music; somehow in a tune like ‘Country John’ off his 1975 <i>Southern Nights </i>album he mixes the interweaving lines of Dixieland jazz with 50s R&B and 70s funk. Witnessing him play ‘Southern Nights’ as twilight fell on a sticky New Orleans day it all came together.</p> <p>Toussaint’s first break was playing on a Fats Domino session, pretending to be Fats when he was away on tour. Then he wrote ‘Java’, an instrumental that sold millions for Al Hirt. Toussaint was addicted to the rhythms of his home town: the syncopation that evolved from funeral parades, in which two bands would answer each other. He could turn the blues into pop, in the same way that his blind schoolfriend Snooks Eaglin could on an acoustic guitar. ‘Sneaking Sally Through the Alley’ is an example: a pop song with drumming from a funeral march, and harmonies like clarinets weaving through a brass band.</p> <p>His first No 1 songwriting and production credit was ‘Mother-in-Law’, which singer Ernie K-Doe rescued from a rubbish tin. Backing vocalist Benny Spellman always claimed it was his deep-voiced response with the title that made it a hit; certainly that line was crucial but not nearly as much as Toussaint’s rippling, irresistible piano. </p> <p>Songs such as ‘Lipstick Traces’ and ‘Fortune Teller’ and ‘I Like it Like That’ followed: simple songs with infectious rhythms. Herman’s Hermits attempted ‘Mother in Law’ and the Dave Clark Five had a go at ‘I Like It Like That’. The Rolling Stones tried ‘Fortune Teller’ and also – gamely – ‘Pain in My Heart’, originally a hit for Otis Redding (it was a re-write of ‘Ruler of My Heart’, which Toussaint wrote for Irma Thomas). (For these last two, and many others, he used his mother’s maiden name as credit: Naomi Neville.)</p> <p>Toussaint’s biggest hit was ‘Southern Nights’, as covered by Glenn Campbell. Or maybe ‘Lady Marmalade’, which he produced for Labelle. He was a like one-man Motown coming out of New Orleans: the leading writer of pop R&B in the South. A group that idolised him was the Hawks, a white rock’n’roll band scuffling round the juke joints of the South. When they made it years later as the Band, they invited him to arrange ‘Life is a Carnival’ and those concerts mentioned above. And they paid tribute to him on the covers album <i>Moondog Matinee </i>with a version of Lee Dorsey’s weary-but-happy ‘Holy Cow’. </p> <p>Out of the thousands of interpretations of Toussaint’s hundreds of songs is one that’s been forgotten here: Auckland R&B group the La De Das’ version of ‘Ride Your Pony’. And another that hasn’t been forgotten, Larry’s Rebels with ‘I Feel Good’ (original <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU3zJkmV_rs">here</a>, thanks Murray). Plus, I’ve just been sent a link to John Rowles doing a wonderful live version of ‘<a href="https://soundcloud.com/jubtok/john-rowles-can-can">Yes We Can’</a> in New Zealand c1973, with the great Billy Nuku on drums. Who’s the bass player?</p> <p>But usually it’s the original versions that stayed the distance, such as all those hits he wrote for Dorsey – everything he did gohn be funky – and local teenager Irma Thomas. ‘It’s Raining’ was his showcase for her: the feathery piano and drip-drop backing singers show how Toussaint could add his flair to the simplest rock’n’roll tunes. Understatement was his signature, plus polyrhythms that turned funerals into carnivals. </p> <p>Toussaint’s funeral in New Orleans will be one of the last great carnivals. His take on the city’s rhythms put a smile on every face and a dance in every step. #</p> <p><a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2012/february/1328675149/paul-kelly/gumbo"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Allen Toussaint by CB april89025" border="0" alt="Allen Toussaint by CB april89025" align="left" src="http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/--nKF7K1OrLU/VkUdhBZ-LyI/AAAAAAAAFrU/Ch_qm87t3bM/Allen%252520Toussaint%252520by%252520CB%252520april89025%25255B3%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="229" height="339" /></a>John Rowles covers ‘<a href="https://soundcloud.com/jubtok/john-rowles-can-can">Yes We Can’</a> live in New Zealand c1973, with Billy Nuku on drums. </p> <p><a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2012/february/1328675149/paul-kelly/gumbo">Paul Kelly on Allen Toussaint</a>. <br /><a href="http://thebluemoment.com/2015/11/10/allen-toussaint-1938-2015/">Richard Williams pays tribute</a>. <br /><a href="http://www.wwltv.com/story/news/2015/11/10/allen-toussaint/75500982/?utm_source=Influential+songwriter%2C+producer+Allen+Toussaint+has+died&utm_campaign=New+Orleans+Agenda&utm_medium=email">New Orleans writer Dominic Massa’s obituary</a>. <br />Toussaint plays ‘<a href="https://youtu.be/liVv4PMPx2o">What Do You Want the Girl to Do’</a>, 2011. <br /><a href="http://allentoussaint.com/">Allen Toussaint’</a>s official website. <br /><a href="https://youtu.be/3UCS1sAUVlM">‘Soul Sister’</a> off Toussaint’s <em>Life Love & Faith. </em> <br />Lee Dorsey with ‘<a href="https://youtu.be/1e8t908XhVI">Everything I Do Gohn Be Funky’</a>. <br />Hour-long <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLMI5Oag1nY">BBC doco</a> on Allen Toussaint. <br />The complete <a href="https://youtu.be/mQ-rcIp7Wmk"><em>Southern Nights</em>,</a> 1975. <br />The complete <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGArmwzJdg0"><em>Desitively Bonnaroo</em></a> by Dr John with the Meters. <br />Sheet music for Toussaint’s post-Katrina instrumental ‘<a href="http://www.stevecastellano.com/2011/01/23/tipitina-and-me-transcribed/">Tipitina and Me’</a> in which he turns Professor Longhair’s exuberant song into a minor-key lament. <br />And finally, the terrific documentary <em><a href="https://youtu.be/aUD06nI-Iqo">Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together</a></em> in which Toussaint (and Tuts Washington) tries to corral his mentor Professor Longhair.</p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-20170859478470043092015-01-08T13:27:00.001+13:002015-01-08T13:36:52.831+13:00Caught in a trap<p><em>If you’re looking for the real Elvis, you’ve come to the right place. </em></p> <p><strong>LAST TRAIN TO MEMPHIS: The Rise of Elvis Presley, by Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown).</strong></p> <p><a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-WK5BO5lkmvs/VK3Oz3_2SQI/AAAAAAAACTI/GsGGYXjPyxw/s1600-h/elvis%252520mourns%252520mom%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 7px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="elvis mourns mom" border="0" alt="elvis mourns mom" align="left" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-PE22iCNmRD4/VK3O0q8vslI/AAAAAAAACTQ/dQjeT86Uc0E/elvis%252520mourns%252520mom_thumb%25255B5%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="196" height="275" /></a>A photograph captures the teen idol on the steps of his newly bought mansion, hugging his father: both men are utterly bereft. Gladys Presley is dead. Vernon Presley has just lost his wife; Elvis, his mother. </p> <p>What follows makes a heartbreaking conclusion to <em>Last Train to Memphis,</em> the first volume of Peter Guralnick’s two-part biography of Elvis Presley. While fans keep a vigil at the gates of Graceland, in the kitchen, Elvis’s cousins and cronies get drunk. In the music room, Elvis sobs and keeps hugging and kissing his mother’s body in its silver casket. A doctor administers a sedative so Elvis can sleep before the funeral, for which Hollywood stars fly in from the coast. Elvis has to be helped into the church; he sobs as his mother’s favourite gospel group sings hymns. At the cemetery he leans over the coffin and cries out, “Goodbye, darling, goodbye.” Four friends drag him to his limo, where he declares, “Oh God, everything I have is gone.”</p> <p>That night, he tells his childhood sweetheart that his life is getting out of control. He is surrounded by new friends, they depend on him now, he can’t walk away. “I’m in too far to get out.” A few weeks later, Private Elvis Presley, serial number 53 310 761, is on a troopship to Germany. The rollercoaster ride of the past three years is over. Elvis is 23.</p> <p>Guralnick is the leading historian of American roots music: blues, country, R&B and soul. Unlike many pop writers, who rely on hyperbole or ego, he writes with the sober eye of a musicologist and the ear of a true fan. As a consequence, his prose sings with authenticity. And his books – among them <i>Lost Highway</i>, <i>Feel Like Going Home</i> and <i>Sweet Soul Music</i> – have always been in print, unlike most pop books.</p> <p><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-_YupckMtVMs/VK3O1hq2jaI/AAAAAAAACTU/XHm_dxWKrJo/s1600-h/Elvis%252520dances%2525201950s%25255B2%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 8px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Elvis dances 1950s" border="0" alt="Elvis dances 1950s" align="left" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDoX3AmDgebcUdlQRMyu0uBi0Dj5J9ZfqR8Nl1DPqSvwu8NGNLsNgLupQeWNuJcXFfwQ0ZqqsJNtKfrIUI9qQq2PtydDUB49fluDD-SmHuL9trN4JHmFlvcRsjv43CscLbCIl6NzZ9E7fd/?imgmax=800" width="187" height="244" /></a>Since the late 1960s, Guralnick has been leading the battle to have Presley discussed as a serious artist. If a campaign was necessary then – when Presley was lost in his own genre of B-movies – now, it’s long overdue. Albert Goldman’s 1981 book <em>Elvis</em> was a ground-breaking necrography that dripped with malice; heavily marketed, it changed the world’s image of Presley to a sad joke with a cheeseburger in both hands.</p> <p>Since then, the running joke that “Elvis is Alive” has only shifted the myth away from the music. And no one could have predicted last year’s marriage between Michael Jackson and Lisa-Marie Presley. That’s what happens when you start reading the tabloids. When it comes to Elvis, it’s best to keep a sense of humour and perspective -and return to the primary sources.</p> <p>Guralnick has compiled his biography like a detective, interviewing first-hand observers and comparing their stories to sort out the accurate from the apocryphal. Contemporary news reports and previously published accounts are quoted when the participants are no longer available (ie, dead). Guralnick also consults archive tapes of Presley interviews and recording sessions, TV shows and concert film footage.</p> <p>The closing scenes described above may sound melodramatic, but Guralnick’s fastidious research makes them utterly credible. The difference is in his attitude -he knows that what drives musicians is often not a quest for stardom, but a sense of vocation. The biography is not hagiography. He delivers the evidence, not a verdict, and avoids speculation, sensationalism and pop psychology.</p> <p><a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-tadeqraCOV0/VK3O3Pf9-EI/AAAAAAAACTk/Hyg9X-Eb9bc/s1600-h/Elvis%252520and%252520Col%252520Tom%252520Parker%25255B3%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 8px 7px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: right; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Elvis and Col Tom Parker" border="0" alt="Elvis and Col Tom Parker" align="right" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-M853q5R9V8w/VK3O4FkRQDI/AAAAAAAACTs/fzyZQORXcsQ/Elvis%252520and%252520Col%252520Tom%252520Parker_thumb%25255B1%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="254" height="171" /></a>Guralnick’s Presley is a complex character. At school he’s desperately shy, but wears flamboyant clothes. He speaks to no one, but explodes with energy when encouraged to sing. He loves gospel music, but also schmaltzy ballads and raunchy R&B. He lives by the Bible in public, but in private doesn’t turn away any women. He’s an odd mix of awkward humility and supreme self-confidence. <em><font size="1">Above: Elvis and the Colonel.</font></em> </p> <p>The story is familiar, but never before has it been told in such evocative detail (Guralnick fills in the facts behind Greil Marcus’s intellectual flights of fancy in Mystery Train). It takes off with Presley’s metamorphosis from misanthrope to musician. The moment in which Elvis, Scotty and Bill discover the sound – by countrifying “That’s All Right [Mama]” – is pure magic. Guralnick’s style is almost novelistic, but scrupulously sourced.</p> <p>Certain themes recur: Presley’s awareness of his image (every outfit is lovingly described) and of every nuance of his performance – hiccup, hip shake or “affable sneer”. Meanwhile, dark clouds loom overhead: the growing Memphis mafia of hangers-on, the increasing crassness of Colonel Parker’s management hustle, the increasing mail from Presley’s draft board – while his mother sits at home drinking beer, missing her baby.</p> <p><em><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-2K0FQkUuSNg/VK3O4irKzgI/AAAAAAAACT0/SaEDMq6QhQw/s1600-h/Elvis%252520army%25255B5%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 8px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Elvis army" border="0" alt="Elvis army" align="left" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-Zcoln2q4BV4/VK3O5QtH5MI/AAAAAAAACT8/RUG5En3oBzg/Elvis%252520army_thumb%25255B5%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="200" height="285" /></a>Last Train to Memphis</em> finally tells the story properly, with sensitivity and insight. It answers the simple questions, the ones that have been hardest to answer: why Elvis sang the way he did, and why his music affected the world so profoundly. And, crucially, what affect fame had on him. Guralnick has re-established the credibility of the early career. Now we can trust him with the vital question of the second volume: did Elvis die when he went into the army? </p> <p><font face="Century Schoolbook"><em>First published in the </em>NZ Listener</font><font face="Century Schoolbook"><em>, 28 January 1995. If he is alive, Elvis is 80 today. I was going to link to his version of Dylan’s ‘<a href="http://youtu.be/wipPRxEXAPY">Tomorrow’s a Long Time’</a> but this is a lot more fun …</em></font></p> <p><iframe height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/kxCCNY4A68M" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-6948771573698546982014-12-02T16:13:00.001+13:002015-09-26T11:03:22.348+12:00Bumper Christmas Retro Music Edition<strong>1. Song Mining</strong> <br />
<a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-eCErNR6lAWA/VH0uYQr3jhI/AAAAAAAACSg/7Sdg3W6iXas/s1600-h/Dylan%252520by%252520Elliott%252520Landy%25255B3%25255D.jpg"><img align="left" alt="Dylan by Elliott Landy" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZgVMFy1iClZ_UTd4W8hyphenhyphenUq8cso9rPOXWNIywp09qDh0Ige0UgJFYYe37KsgcuELTLz1AXixXs0VJJoJ3PwnoOvwEMrDH3GM-cNySkbnldBxf9JLxtsphyulM4K3oshkzpjIbpCw3PSY73/?imgmax=800" height="199" style="background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 8px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="Dylan by Elliott Landy" width="287" /></a>I recently interviewed Greil Marcus about his book <i><a href="http://flavorwire.com/475665/how-greil-marcus-new-book-gives-buzzfeed-the-finger-and-rescues-the-list-as-an-art-form?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow&utm_campaign=FlavorwireSocialhttp://new.bostonreview">The History of Rock’n’Roll in Ten Songs</a> </i>(it can be heard at Radio New Zealand's website <a href="http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/nat-music/audio/20173250/greil-marcus" target="_blank">here</a>). With the imminent release of <i>The Complete Basement Tapes</i> – six CDs, well over 100 songs that Dylan wrote while woodshedding with the Band in 1967 – I had to ask about them. I wondered whether – now that the sessions were finally seeing daylight – this would change the public’s fascination with them. Marcus’s response shows that his fascination with the <em>Basement Tapes </em>hasn’t dimmed since he wrote a whole book on the sessions, <i><a href="http://new.bostonreview.net/BR22.5/riley.html">Invisible Republic</a></i>, in 1997: <br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook; font-size: small;">You know there’s a lot of material – there’s 30 something songs – that have never been heard before, that haven’t been bootlegged or leaked out, song by song, on Dylan’s own <i>Bootleg Series</i>. Certainly there’s stuff I never heard before. And what’s fascinating about it, in the context of the whole set – which I think is going to start this conversation all over again – is you know how down-to-earth and ordinary and ah, <i>work-like </i>a lot of the stuff is. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook; font-size: small;">The [phrase] that leapt to mind when I was listening to the stuff that I hadn’t heard before was “song mining”. These people are digging into what look like songs but they aren’t really. And you just keep digging to see if you find something in there that will explain itself, that will say, ‘No! No! Go in this direction, not that direction’ Really digging in the ground, and finding a root, and grabbing onto that root and thinking, ‘Well this root must <i>lead</i> somewhere, and maybe you find where it leads and maybe you don’t. These are people mining for songs.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook; font-size: small;">And I think that when people listen to all of this material – and its 140 tracks – they’re going to be fascinated by the way that fragments and cover versions of songs that weren’t that interesting to begin with, and experiments that really don’t go anywhere, surround these songs that seem like gifts from the Gods. It’s going to make the whole question of <i>creation</i>, of creativity and writing, and playing and improvising, even more mysterious than it already is. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook; font-size: small;">In some ways the mystique of the <i>Basement Tapes</i> I think is going to be washed away – replaced by the spectre of a bunch of people getting together every day to fool around – in a clubhouse, in a kind of boy’s club. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook; font-size: small;">On the other hand you can say, Well okay, but where did this stuff come from. My God: ‘Tears of Rage’, ‘I Shall Be Released’, ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’ … did some visitation come down and strike these people with lightning, and then go away and leave them to play with ordinary hands – as they weren’t doing for a few weeks? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook; font-size: small;">I don’t know. But I love the way there is stuff here that is mediocre, that is second rate, and stuff that seems like junk – it sounds bad and it’s very hard to hear – and has flashes in it that are as strong and as disturbing as anything in the formal masterpieces that these sessions produced. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Century Schoolbook; font-size: small;">So I think you can tell by the way I’m answering that <i>I don’t know</i>. That I don’t know how to answer your question. That it’s as if you have to learn how to start listening to the stuff as if you’ve never heard it before. And see what story it tells.</span></blockquote>
<strong>2. His Back Pages</strong><br />
At last, a one-stop shop of Greil Marcus’s <a href="http://greilmarcus.net/">archives</a>: articles, interviews and reviews, regularly updated. It was a very smart idea to compile a series of links to all the songs in his “Treasure Island” of essential discs Marcus added to <i>Stranded</i>, the 1979 anthology he edited in which music writers wrote about their “desert island disc”. (The essays by <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lester-bangs-truth-teller">Lester Bangs</a> on <i>Astral Weeks, </i>and M Marks on <i>It’s Too Late to Stop Now </i>are unsurpassed. Bangs’s <a href="http://mulevariations.com/features/lo-greatest-album-review">masterpiece</a> aside, one of the best reviews of <i>Astral Weeks </i>I ever heard was from an older woman who just said, “You breathe in, you breathe out, you breathe in, you breathe out.”)<br />
<strong>3. Writer’s block</strong><br />
Of the six artists featured in Marcus’s 1975 classic <i>Mystery Train </i>(Harmonica Frank, Robert Johnson, the Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman and Elvis Presley) only Newman’s career seems to have continue, rather than ended with <a href="http://whatsheonaboutnow.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/when-it-comes-to-band-it-sad-stories.html">pathos</a>. Still, the exposure didn’t come without a cost to his productivity. In 1983 – I think in San Francisco’s <i>BAM </i>magazine – Newman said: <br />
<blockquote>
When I’m writing songs, the minutes are like hours – I sit there with nothing, just a big picture of Greil Marcus in my mind hanging over the piano as I think, ‘Ah, I don’t think this guy is gonna <i>like </i>this one, because I’m doing the same stuff he criticised me for before.</blockquote>
Marcus’s response? “You know, anybody who reads something I’ve written and comes back and tells me something about it that I didn’t know – that’s a valuable a reader as I can ever hope to have. And that’s happened with musicians and people who aren’t musicians. I really can't talk about other people’s reactions to my work, at least not positive reactions, it just comes off as self-congratulation. I’m lucky that I’ve been able to write, to find people to publish me, and to find people who read me. So that’s all I can say.”<br />
<strong>4. Country gentlemen mystique</strong><br />
Speaking of the Band, I stumbled upon these 1969 reviews from the <i>Village Voice</i> of the Band <a href="http://johannahall.us/04-14_villageVoice051569.pdf">live at the Fillmore</a>, and of their <a href="http://johannahall.us/13-9_VillageVoice102569.pdf">second album</a>. The writer, Johanna Schier, has a charming straightforward style, with a wry wit, a talent for an apt metaphor – and musical insights. (Though she describes Robbie Robertson on stage as “sweetly bashful”, she also hears Smokey Robinson in the chorus of ‘I Shall Be Released’). Schier soon befriended Janis Joplin, and with her future husband John Hall wrote ‘Holy Moon’, the b-side of ‘Me and Bobby McGee’. The pair then founded the group Orleans. <br />
<strong>5. Ballad of a Teenage Queen</strong><br />
<a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-CT3fkbydMhc/VH0uaIOkTeI/AAAAAAAACSw/tgod8_1GBmc/s1600-h/JLL1%25255B1%25255D.jpg"><img align="right" alt="JLL1" border="0" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-dvd-gVjjax0/VH0ua3eWIEI/AAAAAAAACS4/K-jUwq4BaiU/JLL1_thumb%25255B1%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" height="183" style="background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; float: right; margin: 0px 0px 8px 9px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="JLL1" width="252" /></a>We have heard a lot from Jerry Lee Lewis over the years, especially about rock’n’roll and the <a href="http://youtu.be/fto2NZsPJ7E">Devil</a>, but little from his child bride, Myra. At last, <a href="https://medium.com/cuepoint/ballad-of-the-13-year-old-bride-f909cbe1c6b4">she breaks her silence</a>. “They were looking for a place to stick the knife into rock & roll. And Jerry gave it to them—well, I did, I opened my mouth.”<br />
<strong>6. Click track</strong><br />
From David Hepworth, a link to a batch of classic Motown hits with <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/144845/Detroit-masters-at-work">the vocals removed</a>. I know, that seems criminal, but it is so illuminating to be able to concentrate on the Funk Brothers. <br />
<strong>7. Down the avenue again</strong><br />
Van Morrison’s paranoia about YouTube seems to have dissipated. Three extraordinary, lengthy clips have recently been added to the site, without legal intervention thus far. The legendary <i><a href="http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_rock_event_of_1973_van_morrison_live_at_the_rainbow">It’s Too Late to Stop Now</a></i> 1973 shows at London’s Rainbow were broadcast by TVNZ later in the 1970s on <i>The Grunt Machine</i> and talked about for years; a high-def version has been up for a while. Now, two other full-length concerts from the same period are online. At <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_EkgWHcMr4">Winterland</a> in February 1974, in B&W, the band is his usual combo from “Street Choir” period – also featured at the Rainbow, but lacking the string quartet. With a completely different – and integrated – band, but several of the same songs, he can be seen in full colour at the <a href="http://youtu.be/Y_EkgWHcMr4">Orphanage</a>, San Francisco in July 1974 (note the presence of Tom Donahue, the deep-throated influence on all FM rock jocks). Both feature Morrison’s ‘Caravan’ can-can schtick. Perhaps best of all is this 10-minute clip from the <a href="http://youtu.be/I9Dih6JdwpM">Fillmore East</a> in September 1970, introduced by Bill Graham: maybe the earliest filmed version of his ‘Cyprus Avenue’ tease. As a taster to the Winterland gig, here he is covering Dylan’s ‘Just Like a Woman’.<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/8Of6y0bgdUU" width="420"></iframe><br />
<strong>8. Funky, funny and fun</strong><br />
More back pages: here is how the Victoria University of Wellington’s student newspaper <i>Salient </i>reviewed <i><a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Salient32251969-t1-body-d30-d2.html">Abbey Road</a></i> in 1969. Mike Bergin described the medley of songs on side two as “a mess”, whereas that was the only passage <a href="http://gothamist.com/2012/11/26/ny_times_reviews_abbey_road_in_1969.php">Nik Cohn</a> liked in his <em>New York Times </em>review.<em> </em>But Bergin showed a lot of promise in this and other reviews; sadly, he died not long afterwards in a car accident. <br />
<strong>9. Back to the Island</strong><br />
In July, Glenn Jowitt – one of New Zealand’s greatest photographers – died suddenly. He was mourned in Auckland by about 400 of his closest friends in a moving, multi-cultural ceremony. The <em>NZ Herald </em>asked me to write an <a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/arts-literature/news/article.cfm?c_id=18&objectid=11313274">obituary</a>. <br />
<strong>10. Take the Coltrane</strong><br />
A crucial influence on Glenn was the expatriate New York photographer Larence Shustak, who taught him at Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch in the mid-1970s. Glenn was a dedicated music fan and an enthusiastic guitarist (in the 70s he even looked like his hero, Gram Parsons). A connection he had with Shustak that I never knew until researching for the obituary: in the 1950s Shustak took many compelling shots of <a href="http://larenceshustak.photoshelter.com/gallery/Jazz-NYC-1950s-60s/G0000Zeeo1TbNOIs/">New York jazz musicians</a>. <br />
<strong>11. A little bit frightening</strong><br />
Musical racism 101: ‘Kung Fu Fighting’, or <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/08/28/338622840/how-the-kung-fu-fighting-melody-came-to-represent-asia?utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140829&utm_campaign=Music&utm_term=">how to express the whole of Asia in just nine notes</a>. No, not the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwBKjK7Xik0">lyrics</a> – which are bad enough – the influence of the arrangement has been even more pervasive, reports NPR. Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-21727428294051852072014-11-11T12:12:00.001+13:002014-11-11T12:12:38.073+13:00Close Encounters<p><em>Originally published in the </em>NZ Listener<em> in November 2010. </em></p> <p>ROCK MUSICIANS AND photographers are natural-born partners: show-offs need an audience, and a Nikon lens loves a show-off. For some photographers, like Auckland’s <a href="http://www.jarvisrockimages.com/">Bruce Jarvis</a>, the scent of the hunt has been a life-long quest. Shooting first as fans, many become professionals, and Jarvis’s tenacity at capturing live shows secured him access that today’s photographers can only envy. </p> <p>Jarvis’s work is the backbone of a large-format book <i>Live: Gigs that Rocked New Zealand</i>, that portrays the flamboyant visitors in our midst. From the first international rock’n’roll tour – Johnny Cash and Gene Vincent, in 1959 – to Lady Gaga’s aerobic fashion-show earlier this year, the performers are freeze-framed at the peak of their careers. Some of the images – such as <a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-zOPtyM8f9xw/VGFGUxkZZAI/AAAAAAAACRo/YmIIBhGyj9M/s1600-h/ZappaJarvis_thumb12.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 8px 10px 8px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="ZappaJarvis_thumb1" border="0" alt="ZappaJarvis_thumb1" align="left" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/--LBhGEL0i0c/VGFGVw_5hpI/AAAAAAAACRw/2DgpipHRuvk/ZappaJarvis_thumb1_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" width="182" height="267" /></a>Jarvis’s portraits of a satanic <a href="http://www.jarvisrockimages.com/pod-images/products/Frank_Zappa_1112d-1.jpg">Frank Zappa</a>, an exultant <a href="http://www.jarvisrockimages.com/pod-images/products/Bob_Marley_1958d-6.jpg">Bob Marley</a> – belong in the rock photo hall of fame. But even more than the performers, it is the settings that resonate. In the background, a vanished New Zealand hovers like a vaguely remembered backdrop. </p> <p>At the <a href="http://www.audioculture.co.nz/content/images/7723/wysiwyg_full_Beatles-at-Auckland-Town-Hall.jpg">Beatles’ civic reception</a> outside Auckland’s Town Hall in 1964 – how the councillors criticised Mayor Robbie for his generosity – one can glimpse the area now lost to Aotea Square. Out of sight are the 7000 fans who wagged school that morning. Instead, we spot the Market Hotel, one of many Edwardian corner pubs that are long since gone like the Vauxhall Velox seen cruising an almost empty street. Twenty years later, in the same area, a panoramic shot by Bryan Staff shows DD Smash’s drummer <a href="http://www.audioculture.co.nz/content/images/4508/wysiwyg_full_dd851.jpg">Peter Warren</a> surveying a calm, peaceful crowd of thousands. The “Thank God It’s Friday” celebration to welcome the summer of 1984 will soon be renamed the Aotea Square riot. </p> <p>The surprises often come from the unsung heroes who turn emotion into emulsion: the jobbing photographers rostered on for the day by a newspaper’s picture editor. At the Turnbull Library, saved from destruction, are gems from the files of deceased papers such as the <i>Evening Post</i>. These go beyond the requisite Maori welcome parties, the gimmick poses and the bland equivalents of rock stars kissing babies. Among the treasure are action shots of the Who, smashing their equipment on the Wellington’s Town Hall stage in 1968. <a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-6mP_lML6DN4/VGFGWkNzCkI/AAAAAAAACR4/n7qQ0Syq4bs/s1600-h/Viv-Prince-from-natlib.govt.nz_thumb.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 12px 12px 10px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Viv-Prince-from-natlib.govt.nz_thumb" border="0" alt="Viv-Prince-from-natlib.govt.nz_thumb" align="left" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-3H1wgU8_qi4/VGFGXgHxvTI/AAAAAAAACSA/Is4aQp4YBHE/Viv-Prince-from-natlib.govt.nz_thumb%25255B2%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="304" height="341" /></a>Somehow, the Pretty Things’ out-of-control drummer <a href="http://mp.natlib.govt.nz/detail/?id=52481&l=en">Viv Prince</a> found time to sit for a formal portrait during the band’s notorious tour in 1965. He wears a woman’s leopard-skin hat, the coolest of rimless shades, chain bracelets of the style favoured by bodgies – and across his knuckles, a sticking plaster that testifies to his many scrapes while here. </p> <p>As glamorous as some of the stars appear – the Temptations, stepping out in the 1970s’ finest flared suits; Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry, elegant in herringbone tweed – it is the species Kiwi Rock Fan that makes these photos special. Invading the Rolling Stones’ stage in 1966 is an ecstatic fan, resplendent in homemade polka-dot mini skirt. Almost as gleeful are the navy-blue helmeted constables coming to Mick Jagger’s rescue. </p> <p>Parked ostentatiously before the muslin-clad crowd waiting for Rod Stewart at Western Springs stadium in 1977 is a Ford Falcon emblazoned with Radio Hauraki’s logo. Beside it mooches a deejay in denim flares and manky long hair, while staff members or girlfriends attempt cool in satin jackets and bad posture. Their attitude: we are closer to the action than you. </p> <p><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-jMhFXly-NmE/VGFGYHJ4gDI/AAAAAAAACSI/yzIcYARcRpg/s1600-h/StonesbyLloydGodman_thumb12.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 8px 10px 8px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="StonesbyLloydGodman_thumb1" border="0" alt="StonesbyLloydGodman_thumb1" align="left" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-62N0ZBC52v8/VGFGY3m8qfI/AAAAAAAACSQ/ouBUevf0rtw/StonesbyLloydGodman_thumb1_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" width="187" height="277" /></a>The images also evoke the months of excitement that once came with the news that an overseas act was about to play “the Springs”. Long before the mammoth 1980s shows by David Bowie and ZZ Top, the Auckland speedway amphitheatre had hosted Little Richard, Elton John and Neil Diamond. For the first time we can see the Rolling Stones’ 1973 show in colour, thanks to a roll of film shot by <a href="http://www.lloydgodman.net/bedrock/stones/Stone6.html">Lloyd Godman</a>. He didn’t need a flash – they played on a sunny afternoon – and it turns out that Jagger’s diamond-studded, low-cut, satin jumpsuit was turquoise. </p> <p>Presented en masse, many of these shots have a “They walked this Earth” quality. They also answer the perennial question asked of visitors as they step off the plane: how do you find New Zealand? (It was apparently a wide-eyed Australian reporter who enquired “How many of you are there in your quartet, Mr Brubeck?”). </p> <p>The Beatles look jubilant, although reports later came back that they described New Zealand as being like Britain, before the war. The Rolling Stones – specifically, Keith Richards – said of Invercargill it was “the arsehole of the World”. We remember these jibes, and almost more than the concerts we remember the interaction that these troubadours – grizzly or courteous – have with the locals. </p> <p>Contrary to their surly reputation, in 1966 the Rolling Stones look cheerful, with their shirts off, enjoying the sun beside their Wellington motel swimming pool. The Guess Who play an après-gig jam at Tommy Adderley’s speakeasy Grandpa’s (sadly, no one was there to record the night in 1973 that Keith Richards turned up with a guitar and sundry other Rolling Stones). </p> <p>Afterwards, when the litter has been cleared from the town halls and the paddocks that once hosted festivals, the anecdotes turn into urban legends. The Great Ngaruawahia Music Festival of 1973 is now remembered more for <a href="http://www.lloydgodman.net/bedrock/Blerta/Corban_Simpson_2.html">Corban Simpson</a>’s nude performance than for headliners Black Sabbath headlining or the early appearance by Split Ends. Two years later, live on stage at the Te Rapa Racecourse, is Slade’s gormless Dave Hill; he is resplendent in an early mullet, a glitter-pasted forehead, a silver frock coat and platform boots. The promoter of this 1975 one-day festival – the cape-wearing Byron de Lacey – sounds almost mythological.</p> <p>An Auckland school teacher friend says that every year – for nearly four decades – some 15-year-old aspiring guitar heroes in his class ask him the same question. “Sir, have you heard the Led Zeppelin song <i>Stairway to Heaven</i>?” Yes, he replies. “In fact, I heard them play it live at Western Springs in 1972 – before many of us had heard it on record.” </p> <p>“<i>Really</i>?” they gasp. “Led Zeppelin played ... <i>here</i>?”</p> <p>*</p> <p><em><font size="1">The </font><a href="http://mp.natlib.govt.nz/detail/?id=52481&l=en"><font size="1">Viv Prince</font></a><font size="1"> shot is from the Alexander Turnbull Library’s collection of </font></em><font size="1">Evening Post <em>negatives. The reference number is EP/1965/3179.</em></font></p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-30853563505295632702014-04-07T10:00:00.001+12:002014-11-11T20:40:25.400+13:00Firebird Suite<a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-C-jsf3EeAPE/U0HOhceoJJI/AAAAAAAACPM/vouT81nDKsk/s1600-h/stravinsky%252520nz1%25255B7%25255D.jpg"><img alt="stravinsky nz1" border="0" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-_3GHTXiFvQY/U0HOiARzXlI/AAAAAAAACPU/RbvGFM96PHE/stravinsky%252520nz1_thumb%25255B8%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" height="243" style="background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="stravinsky nz1" width="416" /></a> <br />
<strong>When Stravinsky</strong> visited New Zealand in 1961, <a href="http://www.photospace.co.nz/catalogues/shanahan1.htm">Tom Shanahan</a> had something better than a front row seat. As a member of the NZ Symphony Orchestra, and a photographer, he wasn’t looking at Stravinsky’s back when he conducted the orchestra, but his face. Shanahan was sitting with the musicians, ready to play his trombone. Luckily he took his camera along as well, and took some much used photographs of the Russian composer at work in the Wellington Town Hall. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-aVby3ztkHWs/U0HY4ty5FfI/AAAAAAAACP0/QYYZq_i3Y0I/s1600-h/Music%252520in%252520NZ%2525201%25255B2%25255D.jpg"><img align="left" alt="Music in NZ 1" border="0" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-Q7Pdk-47R98/U0HY5ZlNHEI/AAAAAAAACP8/XODi31qWNDM/Music%252520in%252520NZ%2525201_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" height="205" style="background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="Music in NZ 1" width="144" /></a>Shanahan was a very keen photographer, who captured many images of New Zealand’s cultural history over several decades. One photograph – of musicians taken from above – was used on the cover of the first issue of William Dart’s <em><a href="http://www.musicinnz.com/main/listallcontents.htm">Music in New Zealand</a> </em>(left). But he also took thousands of others that weren’t about music, including a set covering the Springbok tour in 1981. <br />
<br />
Now, many of those images and negatives have been lost due to the <a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/wellington/9907294/Precious-items-destroyed-in-blaze">fire</a> – suspected as arson – at the Kilbirnie self-storage unit on Saturday. They were about to be given to the Turnbull Library for safe-keeping and use by future historians; now they are just one of many sad stories left behind by the fire, which ripped through one floor of storage units, and damaged those on another with smoke and water. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-W_4Y-mcsVNg/U0HY6IE9kbI/AAAAAAAACQE/kxawAhUFp50/s1600-h/stravinsky%252520nz2.jpg"><img align="left" alt="stravinsky nz2" border="0" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-vRp9C17BTts/U0HY6860KqI/AAAAAAAACQM/o4pxamZK7bs/stravinsky%252520nz2_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" height="310" style="background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="stravinsky nz2" width="217" /></a>There have been many pros and cons with the National Library and Turnbull’s shift to the digital age. The increased availability of its photograph collection at an affordable price is one of the best elements; the loss of the accessible books on the ground floor – most now need to be ordered from storage – is one of the most difficult to comprehend. <br />
<br />
Last year the New Zealand branch of Fairfax sent millions of images to Arizona to be digitised by a private company. They will hold the originals, and digital copies will be able to be used worldwide. These images have been assembled from the newspapers that Fairfax has bought over the years, and are often the only tangible assets when the papers have later been closed down. The National Library was unable to reach Fairfax’s price. Luckily, before the desperation of media owners in the digital age, the newspaper company INL gave many of its images from the <em>Evening Post </em>and <em>Dominion </em>to the Turnbull before INL was bought by Fairfax. These photos can now be used at an affordable price, usually $20. <br />
<br />
I worry about what’s happening to New Zealand’s other big archive of photos, that of the <em>NZ Herald</em>, <em>Listener </em>and many other publications, since they were bought by Bauer. Already these images had become difficult to access by historians, and at unaffordable prices. For example, in 2010 it cost $80 an hour to research a photo, and then $100 for the use of that photo in a book. <br />
<br />
This has major implications for New Zealand historians: images of our culture are priced off the market. Authors pay for the images they use in a book, not publishers. So when an author is getting, say, $5 royalty on a $50 book, it will take 20 sales just to cover the cost of that single photo. What happens? The photo archives stay idle, unloved and badly treated by their proprietors. <br />
It remains to be seen what the cost of accessing and reprinting a photo from Arizona will be. <br />
<br />
Luckily a vast resource of historic images is being released on the net through social media. Their owners are only too happy to share the images, and some replicate those the publishing conglomerates are sitting on. (It’s understandable the companies protecting their copyrights, where legitimate, but often photos are given to them to use, but not returned; in some cases they were originally paid for by the taxpayer). But there is nothing as safe as a public archive with its own programme of digitising to a high standard. And where the cost of usage isn’t prohibitive. <br />
<br />
<strong>Both photos</strong> are by Tom Shanahan. The top image is from the NZ International Arts Festival <a href="http://2012.festival.co.nz/new-zealand-post-schoolfest/events/stravinsky-oedipus-rexsymphony-of-psalms/">website</a>, the third image is from the <a href="http://www.nzso.co.nz/enotesstravinskyfirebird/">NZSO’s</a> website. It shows Stravinsky meeting members of the NZSO, among them the violinist and Holocaust survivor <a href="http://www.sarahgaitanos.co.nz/books/">Clare Galambos Winter</a>, on the right – the subject of an excellent biography by Sarah Gaitanos.<br />
The NZSO website shares this anecdote by former principal clarinettist Alan Gold: <br />
<blockquote>
“When Stravinsky was here, conducting the end of part of Firebird, where the big chords are, he changed it, which was fine, we did it, and about 18 months later, we had another conductor doing the whole of Firebird, and when we got to the end of it, we played these chords short. The conductor, almost in despair, threw his baton down on his podium. “My God,” he said, “What are you doing that for? What jerk ever told you to play the thing like that?” And old Vince [Aspey – NZSO Concertmaster at the time] he just sat there and said, “Oh, it was some old Russian bugger called Igor, I think!”</blockquote>
Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-44611784767782107772014-01-31T23:41:00.001+13:002014-02-01T08:53:58.812+13:00The envelope, please<p><font face="Century Schoolbook">In February 1984, Michael Jackson was primed to win big at the Grammys for <em>Thriller</em>, but had recently had an unfortunate accident – the first of a few, probably – during a video shoot for one of the album's many singles. His hair was set on fire, and it was uncertain that he would be able to attend. The Grammys were so unhip for so long that whenever they do get it right, it's a relief. They got it right with Lorde. Thirty years on from this story, I can understand why it took so long to shake off the feeling that it was for the old guard of the industry. <a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-3kqDP7Qg7uM/Uut91IPbWhI/AAAAAAAACOg/DuQ3sy118OE/s1600-h/anita%252520kerr%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 6px 10px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="anita kerr" border="0" alt="anita kerr" align="left" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-x-U6kX3hmSk/Uut91xkOLuI/AAAAAAAACOo/bxQdpmGzieA/anita%252520kerr_thumb%25255B2%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="343" height="205" /></a>In the Grammys for 1967 (for recordings of 1966), Sinatra won the best pop vocal, and the Anita Kerr Singers (left) best pop group vocal – the Beatles did get an award, but not for <em>Revolver</em>. Paul McCartney took the Best Contemporary (R&R) Vocal for 'Eleanor Rigby', which was something the old guard could understand. (<em>Pet Sounds </em>also missed out, though it could be said that its innovations were only innovations in rock’n’roll: great melodies aside, it was a pastiche of techniques that had been used in mainstream pop since the early 1950s.  Older Grammy voters could see that.)</font></p> <p><font face="Century Schoolbook">For years the likes of the urbane CBS president Goddard Lieberson held court; they were still hoping that rock'n'roll would go away, and musicals would once again reign supreme, or real vocalists like Barbra Streisand. In 1966, rock’n’roll – and the Grammys – were only about 10 years old. (Were they set up as a counter-attack, and last stand of old values?) They even cut out the rock'n'roll category for 15 years after 1966. This year, I noticed the rock category was completely dominated by has-beens or "heritage acts" such as Led Zeppelin or Neil Young. Now, I don’t care that rock was being sidelined; it has no lien on quality, originality or sincerity. So three cheers for Lorde who, unlike Beyonce, didn't need to f*** in public to get attention, or over-act like the pod-person Taylor Swift, who looked like she was faking an orgasm in a bad movie. </font></p> <p><strong>How to Win a Grammy</strong></p> <p>MICHAEL JACKSON <em>will </em>be there. That’s the latest news from Hollywood. Jackson may have to borrow Frank Sinatra’s toupee, but it’s essential he appears at the 1984 Grammy Awards. There can be no show without Punch. </p> <p>The music industry last year was dominated so effectively by Jackson that without him the show would be rather empty. As it is, this year’s Grammys will be similar to our own record awards last November, when Dave Dobbyn seemed to stroll away with every relevant award. Jackson is eligible for 12 Grammys, having received a record number of nominations. </p> <p>The last time an act dominated the year’s music so overwhelmingly was in 1964, when the Beatles invaded America. Who won the Best New Artist Award? The Bach-scatting Swingle Singers. The Record of the Year was ‘The Girl from Ipanema’, but wait – it gets more perverse. The Best Rock and Roll Recording was not ‘She Loves You’ or ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ – but Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’. </p> <p>The Beatles did win a Grammy that year,for the Best Performance by a Vocal Group. Ironically, the song which won them the award was ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, in a year when the winner for Best Motion Picture Score was <em>Mary Poppins. </em></p> <p>In 1966, just as rock music began to have some bite again, Rock and Roll was dropped as a Grammy category. But as the American rock writer Dave Marsh points out, “the travesties picked from 1962 to 1966, when ‘Winchester Cathedral’ was one of the victors, made it obvious that the Best Rock and Roll slot was a fraud from the start.”</p> <p>There was no Rock and Roll category again until 1979, when a tuxedoed Bob Dylan collected his first Grammy for ‘You Gotta Serve Somebody’ – a gospel song. But then, the only Grammys Elvis Presley ever won were for his gospel recordings. ‘How Great Thou Art’ won <em>twice. </em></p> <p>Marsh is one of those who believe the Grammy Awards have an anti-rock bias. The confusing thing is that though the cynical may think that sales would be the only criterion that counted – and whatever one may think of rock as music, it does sell – rock music has invariably been snubbed. </p> <p>But there is another irony. Popular music tastes and these days the mass market in America demands a heavier sound. Some critics suggest that it was Michael Jackson’s use of heavy-metal guitarist Eddie Van Halen which helped him break through the virtual ban on black music on the FM stations and the all-rock cable TV channel MTV. With the greater exposure, Jackson’s album <em>Thriller </em>went on to sell an estimated 20 million copies. </p> <p>The Grammys are voted for by the members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (Naras). The voting system is questionable – only active members of Naras can vote, but they only have to be active in the industry at the time they join. From then on, as long as they pay their fees, they can vote. Block voting and the trading of votes is not uncommon. “Many record companies,” says Marsh, “vote in wholesale lots, without regard for quality. This problem is endemic to industry awards.”</p> <p>Of course, conflicts of interest also arise. In 1975, Janis Ian led the nominations, being eligible for five awards – and the producer of her comeback album was a past president of Naras. Albums ignored that year included Bob Dylan’s <em>Blood on the Tracks </em>and Bruce Springsteen’s <em>Born to Run. </em></p> <p>But there is a lack of interest in the awards among the US music industry, because the Grammys don’t really mean very much. Being nominated for, or winning, an Oscar ensures that a rerun of the movie will make money, but a Grammy does not mean a retailer will push on of last year’s albums. </p> <p>Sales figures are central to winning the Grammy, but equally important is the need to be recognisable to out-of-touch Naras members. As with any political election, in the end, voters may choose not on the issues, but for the name they recognise. </p> <p>This is how Christopher Cross won five Grammys with his debut album in 1981. The album had already gone platinum (two million units sold) before the Grammys, but more importantly, Cross had covered the TV talk-show circuit – collecting “exposure” as any good candidate should. </p> <p>Classical music gets similar treatment from the Grammys. Itzhak Perlman’s talents as a violinist are equalled by his skills as a candidate. Perlman, who has won several Grammys in the past, and has four nominations this year, is a veteran TV talk-show guest who even appears on <em>Sesame Street</em>. Classical critic William Anderson comments: “Naras members vote not for the things they have heard but for things they have heard <em>of</em>, and all too often in a field where they are less than knowledgeable.”</p> <p>THIS YEAR, Michael Jackson has had more exposure <em>and</em> sales than anyone. But he leads a strong field: his main opponents are David Bowie, the Police, Billy Joel, Lionel Richie and the <em>Flashdance </em>soundtrack. At the American Music Awards, in January, Jackson collected seven awards, winning every category he entered but one. In an upset, Lionel Richie’s ‘All Night Long’  won the favourite soul single award. </p> <p>Of the candidates for the Best New Artist, Culture Club is the most “recognisable” amongst Big Country, Eurythmics, Men Without Hats and Musical Youth. </p> <p>But why have the Grammys? Says Dave Marsh: “The Grammys ought to bring some artistic recognition to a form and an industry all too often seen as shallow and corrupt. For much of the public, the Grammys establish popular music’s artistic reputation. Yet the Grammys continue to snub art whenever it rears its head.” </p> <p><em>THE 1984 GRAMMY AWARDS, Friday on TWO, 6.30pm. </em></p> <p><font face="Century Schoolbook">First published in the <em>Listener</em>, 10 March 1984. The Grammys get it right more often than they used to – sometimes because a broken clock is correct twice a day – though there are still anomalies such as this year’s rap award going to the Pat Boone duo of rap. It’s easy to mock: there are thousands of new releases each year, and – despite the number of categories, which was only recently cut from over 100 to about 75 – every year, some future classics will miss out. But there is a lot of fun to be had going back and forth through the years starting with these results from </font><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9th_Annual_Grammy_Awards"><font face="Century Schoolbook">1966</font></a><font face="Century Schoolbook">. But one wonders really what the rock-blinkered Marsh was frothing at the mouth about: weren’t the acts he was championing supposed to be alternatives to the establishment? As David Hepworth pointed out this week, in reference to this year’s <em>Hollywood Reporter </em>school photo of high-profile Grammy acts, “I look at this Grammy Awards line-up picture & think of all the past greats who would have refused to do it.”</font></p> <p><a href="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-fzNvX_86NaA/Uut92Ta3m5I/AAAAAAAACOw/w2tEJ0Eb-38/s1600-h/grammy2014.2%25255B3%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="grammy2014.2" border="0" alt="grammy2014.2" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-VCEgOiodIVA/Uut93F8nTRI/AAAAAAAACO4/lWAKrMXUVzE/grammy2014.2_thumb%25255B1%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="445" height="259" /></a></p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-58913884394437702332013-12-13T22:49:00.001+13:002013-12-15T12:44:29.436+13:00Liverpool Kiss<p><font face="Century Schoolbook">Inevitably, interviewing <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/jul/05/1">George Melly</a> was an unforgettable encounter. That’s why I suggested it to the <em>Listener</em>. We met at 10.00am, he ordered a gin and tonic, and he was away. His 1965 memoir <em>Owning Up </em>about his days in a 1950s UK jazz band is one of the great music memoirs, about the days of touring before the M1 was built, staying in dodgy B&Bs with <em>Carry On </em>landladies, pints and pints of beer, and apres-gig knees-ups beneath the canal bridge. The article below was written in 1990, when Melly was one of many unfashionable musical guests of the “International” Wellington festival of the arts. I mean, were they serious about inviting Max Bygraves? But Melly’s talents went beyond the trad jazz they hired hiim for. </font></p> <p><font face="Century Schoolbook">Fifteen years later, in 2005, I saw Melly wandering through a leafy street in St John’s Wood, London, very near Abbey Road. Two years before his death, he was still in his pyjama suit, but seemed decrepit with his stick and eye patch. All his memoirs are great reading, evening the final one about his physical decline, <em>Slowing Down.</em> He was <em>trisexual – </em>try anything – and he certainly <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-492135/Diana-Melly-reveals-extraordinary-marriage-George--bed-hopping-jazz-legend.html">tried</a>. Was the <em>Daily Mail </em>pic serious when it captioned this picture, “Despite his bed-hopping, George Melly was loved by jazz fans across the world.”?</font></p> <p><strong><a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-1PBpCt_Xxr4/UqrYDlz-jMI/AAAAAAAACN0/fs-hAgjhvDE/s1600-h/Melly%252520vertical%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Melly vertical" border="0" alt="Melly vertical" align="left" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-dnX_LV1ZuGI/UqrYE8S5elI/AAAAAAAACN8/6wlzyhRjBlI/Melly%252520vertical_thumb%25255B2%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="249" height="402" /></a>BEING BORN</strong> in Liverpool, claimed one celebrated citizen, carries with it certain responsibilities. It also makes one a member of the Liverpool mafia, says George Melly. “You give a few signs, says ‘ ’ello thur wack!’ and you’re away at once. It’s a sort of Freemasonry by birth.”</p> <p>Melly, jazz singer and scholar, art critic and popular culture essayist, raconteur and bon vivant, still feels the pull of his birthplace. Immediately after his appearance at the 1990 International Festival of the Arts in Wellington he was going back to judge an art competition in a brewery. And the Liverpool Polytechnic have just awarded him an honorary degree. </p> <p>Are they trying to make the man in the pyjama-striped suit and fruit-salad tie <em>respectable</em>? He hopes not. “It’s a great difficulty not to slip into being embraced by the establishment as one gets older. However the recent scandal about one’s seduction of Peregrine Worsthorne helps keep respectability from the door!”</p> <p>Melly chuckles with saucy delight. The revelations in the defamation case between London Newspaper editors were in fact old news. Both Melly and the <em>Sunday Telegraph </em>editor had already written about their teenage liaison in their autobiographies. “But it was useful evidence in [<em>Sunday Times </em>editor Andrew] Neil’s trial of Worsthorne. Because Neil could say, ‘How dare this man say I shouldn’t go out with a perfectly respectable call-girl, and give her a Magimix, when he himself has admitted in print that he was seduced by a jazz singer!?’”</p> <p>Surely Melly’s confessional memoir <em>Owning Up </em>makes it harder to be a victim of the tabloids? “I daresay they could find things that would embarrass me,” he says. “But it’s much harder. It’s not like I always pretended to be a pillar of the church and the establishment. You can’t accuse somebody of something they’ve already admitted to themselves.”</p> <p>Melly arrived in London in the early 1950s, after a stint in the navy (detailed in <em>Rum, Bum and Concertina</em>). Although this was before it became a “positive bonus” to come from the provinces, he didn’t have any trouble infiltrating the London art world and music scene. “Liverpudlians take it for granted that they’re going to amuse and charm everyone, even if they’re not.”</p> <p>An ideological battle was going on between jazz fans at the time. One was either a revivalist or a trad jazzer, and one didn’t fraternise with the opposition. They argued over the cut-off point when jazz lost its “purity” – after it left New Orleans, or when big-band-swing came along? Meanwhile the UK beboppers, led by Ronnie Scott and Johnny Dankworth, and better musicians, according to Melly, interpreted the jazz of their own era.</p> <p>“i was a revivalist, totally,” he says. “I thought bebop was the work of the devil. Ridiculous nonsense. Nowadays one hears it as just a development, it came out of what came before it.” In the mid-1950s with the arrival of Elvis, it looked as though jazz was doomed. “But somehow it staggered to its feet and produced its most banal and boring period, the trad boom of the late ’50s, which in turn was swept out of the way by the Beatles: beat music, as we called rock’n’roll.”</p> <p>Melly is adept at giving a potted history of post-war British jazz, having witness its “death”, and revival, several times over. For the moment, he says, jazz is “extraordinarily chick” in London, even if it sounds like an accessory to fashion photography. Young black musicians like Courtenay Pine are stars, jazz has replaced rock on film soundtracks, and is used to advertise clothes and scent. “You see people in pseudo-Armani black clothes and pale expressionless faces listening to that form of jazz. I don’t know them very well, these types of people. I’m more likely to see them at art galleries than at a jazz concert.”</p> <p>In the 1960s, Melly retired from singing and started to write. <em>Revolt Into Style</em>, his 1970 collection of essays on British popular culture, still reads well, relying on sober, informed analysis rather than dated hipness. The book almost predicts punk rock with its conclusion that pop was “temporarily done for”, having turned “pretentious and sour”. </p> <p>For a recent new edition. all Melly added was an afterword saying that punk was the only exciting thing to have happened since. “But I said I was letting the book stand. As a consequence there are now what appear archaic references, and the word <em>negro </em>throughout, which now gives one a shock to read. But the word was respectable then – if I’d used <em>black </em>I would have been very unpopular. And now I believe ‘black’ is dying out and one has to say something cumbersome like <em>Afro-American.</em>”</p> <p>Melly returned to performing in the mid-1970s, with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers. “I still did it when people asked me, but they very infrequently did during the Beatles.” Ronnie Scott’s club gave them a residency because, he suspects, they attracted a crowd of young heavy drinkers, and the act became a cult. It was time to give up the day job. “We decided to go back on the road, we’d had a taste of it again. And it promised to be in rather more luxurious circumstances than hitherto. in the ’50s one led a very squalid life, which appeals to you when you’re young, but less so when you're middle-aged.”</p> <p>Is performing still, as he once suggested, like seduction? “Yes, but I’m rather better at performing than seduction, I have to add. But it’s a similar process. I have an audience there who is a virgin every night, willing or unwilling. You come on stage and have to get them into a state where they’re saying ‘yes’ by the end. The similar may appal some people but I think it’s an accurate one – and for every performer, in whatever sphere. Playing the cello with an orchestra, acting Richard III, the audience has to be seduced.” </p> <p><a href="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-mdnihiyfq3w/UqrYFneDccI/AAAAAAAACOE/pui7XN-KxWg/s1600-h/Melly%25252050s%25255B3%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Melly 50s" border="0" alt="Melly 50s" align="left" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-itnwj-bOUYE/UqrYGRgO_jI/AAAAAAAACOM/sozjme3_4zc/Melly%25252050s_thumb%25255B1%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="334" height="278" /></a><strong>Though Melly’s</strong> blackface vocals can make Al Jolson seem like Ray Charles, his sincerity is unimpeachable. he is more an educator than interpreter, leading people to on to the originals. “I hope so,” he says. “Yesterday in this town somebody said, ‘I saw a concert you gave in England years ago and I went out and bought a Bessie Smith record, and I’ve still got it.’ If I’ve done that one in a thousand times …</p> <p>“Of course, right from the start one questioned one’s right in black music. I did it at first because I so believed in it, and I’ve done it for so long I can’t give it up. And I must say what criticism I’ve had has always been from white critics. And I’ve sung with many black artists, none of whom have been anything but … kind.”</p> <p>Melly’s love of 1920s jazz began at school, when he heard Muggsy Spanier’s ‘I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate’. “In between seducing Peregrine Worsthorne I was listening to this music,” he says. Then, the musicians were still in the entertainment business and consequently “produced a great deal of marvellous music because they weren’t self-consciously in pursuit of great art. There is high art, there is low art, and there is an awful lot of art which is pretentious, takes itself terribly seriously and produces nothing of lasting value.”</p> <p>Bessie Smith is till his number-one singer. Next, he’d put “a whole lot of people in a row”: Ma Rainey, Jimmy Rushing, Joe Turner, Fats Waller, the “underrated” Ethel Waters, Bill Holiday. “There’s a big spectrum there, but Bessie – not even Billie has the same effect on me.”</p> <p>However Melly no longer sings ‘Frankie and Johnny’ – the seduction requires too much energy. “One has to pretend to be shot – if possible fall off the stage, which is sometimes several feet high – leap to one’s feet and continue to sing, and so on. I don’t think I’d be able to do it more than once, and then with luck. So I dropped that many years ago.”</p> <p>Another singer who made ‘Frankie and Johnny’ his own was Sam Cooke, who was shot in circumstances uncannily similar to those in the song Melly the scholar hasn’t considered this example of life following art. But if that’s the case, he say’s, “I’d prefer ‘Do You Want a Hot Dog in Your Roll’, which is a song I sing <em>now</em>, to come true than ‘Frankie and Johnny’.”</p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-18392950462653748762013-12-09T23:05:00.001+13:002013-12-12T20:27:45.010+13:00Dreams to Remember<p><a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-esFWaXrOYuY/UqWVskejjkI/AAAAAAAACME/w56uOfmIN1U/s1600-h/RY%252520cover%25255B2%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 7px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="RY cover" border="0" alt="RY cover" align="left" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-dXRdNqCrJUI/UqWVtkAva7I/AAAAAAAACMM/ZyMhAtTh7Bg/RY%252520cover_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" width="162" height="244" /></a>At Stax Records the walls came tumbling down, twice. The first collapse of the legendary Memphis label began in December 1967, when Otis Redding’s sudden death was quickly followed by Stax’s separation from its distributor, Atlantic Records of New York. The death of Redding took out the label’s biggest solo star, while still in his ascendancy. The split with Atlantic didn’t just remove Sam & Dave from its books – the dynamic duo had only been “loaned” to Stax by Atlantic – it removed Stax’s entire back catalogue from its books. A hidden clause in Atlantic’s distribution contract said that ownership of the masters was vested in them, although Stax had made and paid for the recordings. </p> <p>Another event in 1968 damaged the culture of Stax irrevocably. The murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel – a location that was one of the few to welcome visiting black musicians – altered the racial harmony that had existed at the label from the beginning. In a city where racism and segregation – both official and entrenched – survived long after the civil rights breakthroughs elsewhere, Stax was an integrated oasis. <a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-6FkU6IXYzaQ/UqY1AQFv-RI/AAAAAAAACNc/7AbzTOhlizU/s1600-h/RY%252520BT%252520MG.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 7px 0px 5px 10px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: right; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="RY BT MG" border="0" alt="RY BT MG" align="right" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-NfWNR2kvl8s/UqWVu3Ktc2I/AAAAAAAACNk/Rs4-0fGjDhs/RY%252520BT%252520MG_thumb%25255B3%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="233" height="258" /></a>It is crucially important to the Stax story that its house band Booker T and the MGs (right) was a “mixed crowd”. Booker T was the quartet’s black, teenage keyboard prodigy; drummer Al Jackson its black, metronomic groove master; Steve Cropper a white, quiffed C&W-influenced guitarist; and providing the fluid bottom-end came from Donald “Duck” Dunn, an amiable white bass player. </p> <p>The death of MLK and the racial mores and tension in Memphis are crucial to the Stax story. In <a href="http://memphismusichalloffame.com/author/robert-gordon/">Robert Gordon</a>’s rich, absorbing new history of the label, <i><strong>Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion</strong> </i>(Boomsbury USA), the issue of race is like a bad-ass backing vocal against the two-part harmony in the forefront: the music and business angles. Stax has been well covered over the years; dominating the work of Stax scholars and obsessives worldwide are Peter Guralnick’s moving, wide-ranging <i>Sweet Soul Music</i>, and Canadian musicologist Rob Bowman’s exhaustive <i>Soulsville</i>. But in <em>Respect Yourself</em>, you can taste the grits. </p> <p>Gordon is a Memphian, who has been writing and directing documentaries about local music for nearly 30 years. He connects with the way musicians work and live, and he is also a superb story teller. <i>Respect Yourself </i>is the book he has been writing in the back of his mind since he first picked up a pen, producing two other classics in the meantime. <i>It Came From Memphis </i>(1994) was<i> </i>mostly about the city’s alternative rock scenes of the 1960s and 1970s, with Elvis and Stax barely mentioned, and <i>Can’t Be Satisfied </i>(2002) was an atmospheric, sensitive biography of Muddy Waters. Like Guralnick at a similar stage, Gordon has now produced a trilogy that evocatively recreates the culture in which American popular music was re-invented and heard worldwide. </p> <p>Reeling from the blows it took in 1968 after Redding died, Stax quickly rebuilt itself under the new management of the visionary, risk-taking black entrepreneur Al Bell. His first task was to create an instant catalogue by recording and releasing 28 new albums simultaneously in an extravagant marketing gesture called the Soul Explosion. Extravagance soon became a byword at Stax, which had been founded by Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, two sensible, generous-hearted, white, small town music lovers. The frugality of Stewart’s approach is captured in the waste-free backings that Booker T and the MGs provided to the label’s first wave of recordings. </p> <p>That extravagance was exemplified by the solo career of Isaac Hayes, Stax’s biggest star in the flamboyant Bell years. For Hayes (below), who first made his name as a Stax songwriter and producer, mostly for Sam & Dave, it meant recording albums with tracks that lasted nearly 20 minutes, wearing gold chain mail and little else as stage costumes, and driving a gold Cadillac, gifted to him in gratitude by Stax. </p> <p><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-_cRk8elzJOo/UqWVv08lNvI/AAAAAAAACMk/KlanCZrVAG4/s1600-h/RY%252520isaac%25255B7%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 3px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="RY isaac" border="0" alt="RY isaac" align="left" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-uPtLoUKYsK0/UqWVwhwq0jI/AAAAAAAACMo/6t4U8oq0cmw/RY%252520isaac_thumb%25255B2%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="287" height="215" /></a>Pimp my wheels doesn’t begin to capture the swagger of the <em>Shaft</em> era, but does hint at another element of the story: the gangster-like behaviour of Johnny Baylor, a black hustler Bell hired to make sure distributors paid their bills and radio DJs played their records. Baylor, who likely put on a gun before his underwear, and his henchman Dino Woodard seem to be characters out of a Blaxploitation movie: they worked in entertainment, they had a great soundtrack, but their actions were deeply sinister. </p> <p>It was Baylor who brought the walls of Stax tumbling down for the second time, when his bags were searched at Memphis airport, because of an unrelated bomb threat. Inside his bag were stacks of greenbacks, totalling more than $129,000. This alerted the FBI and IRD on to Stax: they were suspicious of the legitimacy of the money, and of other shadowy practices at the Southern, black-owned, independent company. Over the next couple of years Stax inexorably came apart, when debts to its local bank – itself a shaky, dodgy institution – were called in, and many were found to be fraudulent thanks to a bank employee taking backhanders. By 1976 the doors of Stax’s famous studio on McLemore Avenue were padlocked by armed guards, its publishing assets and master tapes taken by receivers. The label has since been sold several times, but is now in good hands at Concord Records, and thanks to revivals spurred by tributes such as <i>The Blues Brothers </i>and <i>The Commitments </i>movies, countless cover versions, and mostly the sheer strength of the back catalogue, the music Stax made has never been forgotten. </p> <p>What makes Gordon’s book the best yet on this story – which is familiar to aficionados, but unknown to the millions who love the hits – is his identification with the musicians, their characters, and the community from which they sprung. So too is his use of the Memphis Sanitation workers’ strike of 1968 as a parallel story to relate just how pervasive and enduring racism and segregation was in the city. </p> <p>Guralnick laid the groundwork in 1985 with <i>Sweet Soul Music</i>, which also covered other aspects of soul which didn’t emanate from Memphis (ie James Brown, Muscle Shoals). Bowman’s verbose, earthbound epic made one’s eyes water from the detail, and lacked the flair to move a reader from the armchair to the turntable. (<i>Soulsville</i> has a new purpose now as a book-length series of footnotes adding information about incidents to Gordon’s fast-paced, yet thorough, story-telling.)</p> <p><a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-K9ymqvg4r-0/UqWVxNDF_qI/AAAAAAAACM0/D6iX7j1oI7U/s1600-h/RY%252520estelle%25255B12%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: right; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="RY estelle" border="0" alt="RY estelle" align="right" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-GHC6I4sI_tI/UqWVxn0PLRI/AAAAAAAACM4/didrMesuPBs/RY%252520estelle_thumb%25255B4%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="218" height="226" /></a>Thanks to Gordon’s skill, the humanity of the characters comes through: Jim Stewart as the sober founder, out of his depth; his sister Estelle Axton – the hero of the book – whose open-mindedness welcomed talented black youths inside the studio; the dignified prodigy Booker T; the reliable Steve Cropper; the brilliant if flawed Al Bell. There is a sense of foreboding as the story unfolds: Stax is like a rollercoaster that sails through social and business barriers, taking risks at every corner, then builds up speed so that inevitably gravity comes knocking, in the guise of a hooded taxman and bank auditor. Gordon gets the sense of community and family that were essential to Stax’s success, and describes music making with just the right amount of colour and knowledge that while reading one is transported to the dance floor. <em>Above: Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton. </em></p> <p>Gordon has been interviewing the participants for almost 30 years, some of them for the 2007 Stax documentary <i>Respect Yourself</i>, which he co-directed. While the acknowledgements and suggestions of further reading and listening are helpful, I could have done with more precise information in the appendix about exactly who he interviewed, rather than general attributions to, say, Guralnick, who was one of several people who provided Gordon transcripts of their own interviews with key players. (Dead or alive, the interviewees are all quoted in the present tense.)* Also, the occasional subjective quip – which increase as the story continues – can sometimes intrude. </p> <p><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-9xc29dd_6U8/UqWVyK0gfrI/AAAAAAAACNE/MIzyYnFkGSk/s1600-h/RY%252520Wex%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 4px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="RY Wex" border="0" alt="RY Wex" align="left" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-mUnPFSo1zTw/UqWVzM-XOWI/AAAAAAAACNM/1-dmcldkSrQ/RY%252520Wex_thumb%25255B2%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="300" height="179" /></a><em>L-R: Jerry Wexler, Sam & Dave, Al Bell.</em> </p> <p>Gordon is understandably sceptical about Atlantic executive Jerry Wexler’s protestations of innocence in the saga of the company’s ruthless contract with Stax, but this could have been examined further. Wexler brought the incident up moments after Gordon began his interview with an innocent question, which is interpreted as “he protesteth too much”. Wexler could also have been racked with guilt, and haunted by the clause decades later. He was known as hard-nosed but always respected as a music man, not a suit: he could well have been oblivious to it. In his own biography, Wexler uses almost exactly the same words as he said to Gordon, and names Paul Marshall as the Atlantic lawyer responsible for the master-grabbing clause in fine print neither party had read. Also, there is a mention of Wexler asking Jim Stewart if he was interested in Aretha Franklin, whose contract at Columbia was about to finish. $25,000 was too much for Stax, so Atlantic signed her directly. I am unconvinced that Wexler would be so coldblooded towards the small Memphis label, whose musical and personal style he so admired, that he would suggest this while knowing of the hidden clause. </p> <p>That small niggle aside, even when the business story of Stax begins to dominate the racial, political, and most importantly the musical angles, <i>Respect Yourself </i>is an exhilarating, often heart-breaking history. It will satisfy Stax aficionados and the newly converted, and does justice to the story by providing a context to the miracle of Memphis – and by opening up the music itself, like a re-mix editor looking for a hidden hook in the original multi-track tapes.</p> <p>When I first visited Memphis, on an overnight stopover in 1988, I asked a white taxi driver where we were in relation to Stax. “Sex?” he said. “You want sex?” It was mainly my accent (in Georgia, asking for a Beck’s beer, after much confusion I was offered a Bax) but the confusion typified the disinterest that mainstream Memphis had in its local success story. One of the most gratifying elements of Gordon’s book is the conclusion, which suggests this disdain – much of it a product of institutional and inbuilt racism – has now evaporated. In the wake of Elvis’s death and the tourism dollars generated by Graceland, a new respect has been granted Stax. But the positive ending isn’t about filling motel rooms, it’s in keeping with the spirit of the label. The <a href="http://www.staxmuseum.com/">Stax Museum of American Soul Music</a> – its premises a replica of the studio, on the original site – now contributes enormously to the community with its music and education programmes. This street-level activity proves to the neighbourhood children, whose grandparents once danced outside the doors of the studio, that music will not just help take you there, but to respect yourself. </p> <p><font size="1"><font size="2" face="Century Schoolbook">* Update – apparently more expanded footnotes are to appear on Robert Gordon’s website, alongside some </font><a href="http://therobertgordon.com/ghost-of-stax-past/"><font size="2" face="Century Schoolbook">pure musical gold</font></a><font face="Century Schoolbook"><font size="2"> he rescued when visiting the Stax building as it was demolished: a stash of reel-to-reel tapes, featuring jam sessions by Booker T and the MGs, radio stings, etc.</font> </font></font></p> <p><font size="1"><font size="2" face="Century Schoolbook">Visit the </font><a href="http://memphismusichalloffame.com/inductees/"><font size="2" face="Century Schoolbook">Memphis Music Hall of Fame</font></a><font size="2" face="Century Schoolbook"> website for many rare pictures and links to audio interviews and video clips. The </font><a href="http://www.staxmuseum.com/video-images/videos/"><font size="2" face="Century Schoolbook">Stax Museum</font></a><font size="2" face="Century Schoolbook"> also has many video clips. Here is a Spotify </font><a href="http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/entertainment/233174511.html"><font size="2" face="Century Schoolbook">playlist of 252 songs</font></a><font size="2" face="Century Schoolbook"> mentioned in the book, compiled by Jim Higgins of Milwaukee.</font> </font></p> <p><iframe height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Lsu1gtGuvao" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> <p><em><font size="1">Finally, a word from our sponsor, Rufus Thomas. </font></em></p> <p><iframe height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/WoWK5dW5c-8" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-65826416940241659962013-10-19T22:15:00.001+13:002013-10-26T21:19:49.833+13:00Celtic Swing<p><em>The cancelled <a href="http://chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2010/08/picnic-at-hanging-rock.html">Neon Picnic</a> festival of January 1988 had one good spinoff – the amount of copy it generated for </em>Rip It U<em>p (even if I am still $200 out of pocket for hiring a caravan for the magazine’s campsite). I interviewed Roy Orbison, Murray Cammick interviewed Nona Hendryx, and Kerry Buchanan tried to talk to James Brown. Although Orbison died shortly after I talked with him, especially memorable was an interview I did with Philip Chevron of the Pogues. While the rest of the band was on tour, he was at home with an ulcer, and handling the interviews. He turned out to be exceptionally articulate and knowledgeable about the history of Irish pop music. Besides the courteous closing line – the idea had simply never occurred to me – for years I have been quoting his line about the boorish Irish expatriates and wannabes who appear around the world on St Patrick’s Day: “We’re a bit more subtle about our Irishness over here.”</em>  </p> <p><em>Sadly, Phil Chevon has recently died, of oesophageal cancer, aged 56. Contrary to the Pogues image, he was a well-read, historically minded, highly astute musician, and quite philosophical. Shortly before his death he said, “I am a gay, Irish, Catholic, alcoholic, Pogue who is about to die from cancer – and don’t think I don’t know it.”</em> </p> <p><em>Along with Bob Geldof, the Pogues were one of the few acts that made it to New Zealand for the Neon Picnic. With so many people in Auckland to attend the festival that never happened, the Pogues’ gig at the Galaxy was packed to the ceiling with an audience that had already been partying all weekend. MacGowan won few friends among the audience for his slurred, out-of-it performance, and even fewer backstage where he insisted on limitless supplies of white wine and go-fast. </em></p> <p><strong>THE IRISH</strong> are plagued by ignorant stereotypes, but they know how to have a good time— I can personally recommend their funerals.</p> <p>Sunday night is certain to be hoedown night at Neon Picnic, with the Pogues and Los Lobos on the same bill. Both bands have brought a contemporary edge and spirit to sounds that reach back over generations, and both bands know how to move the soul and the feet.</p> <p>The Pogues are currently in New York, filming a video for their new single ‘Fairy Tale of New York.’ Then they tour the East Coast and Canada, finishing up at the Hollywood Palladium as guests of their friends Los Lobos.</p> <p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp8g5g6Mn_5OlftJvcPLnCnDOL8b6eTT13NudtabZyy8UAI_mcYjiGDPNRVvsTVchgIoDEdKKwlgKkO1y-xYOkiZbzOvVlDYOVAJN7P2EXD2OccZ3EK69b6WGDkAV66dzZWpV4psg47CN-/s1600-h/chevron%252520sepia%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="chevron sepia" border="0" alt="chevron sepia" align="left" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-9JBJDeGb_DM/UmJNuf6dEwI/AAAAAAAACLU/pj6QRnCwy8A/chevron%252520sepia_thumb%25255B1%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="170" height="258" /></a>But one Pogue who has stayed home in London is guitarist Philip Chevron. “I’ve had to stay behind because I’ve had a recurring duodenal ulcer which I need treatment for. But I’m feeling a bit better now,” he says.</p> <p>Filling in for Chevron in North America is Joe Strummer. Last year the Clash singer and the Pogues starred, together with Elvis Costello, Grace Jones and Dennis Hopper, in <em>Straight to Hell</em>, a spoof spaghetti western by Sid and Nancy director Alex Cox. It received mixed reviews...</p> <p>“Well I liked it!” laughs Chevron. “It was great fun to make, basically our annual summer holiday which we filmed and then forced on people in cinemas... no, it was a lot of hard work actually.”</p> <p>Chevron joined the Pogues temporarily in 1985 before <em>Rum Sodomy and the Lash</em> – when their banjo player Jem Finer needed a rest. “I liked it so much I stayed, well they invited me to.” Prior to that, he was in the seminal punk combo Radiators from Space. “We were the only punk band in Ireland, so we were quite well known for a while.” The Radiators, who had “terrible trouble” battling with an Australian outfit of the same name, made two albums, and Chevron has made two solo LPs, one produced by Elvis Costello.</p> <p><strong>A LOT IS MADE</strong> of the Pogues’ punk origins, with Finer and million-dollar smile Shane MacGowan being part of the Nipple Erectors. But through the Pogues’ concertina player Terry Woods, who helped form Steeleye Span, there are links back to an earlier era when traditional music was popular:</p> <p>“There’s a long gap between that folk rock and us,” says Chevron. “Very early Steeleye Span were very good and adventurous, as were early Horslips and early Fairport Convention. But somewhere along the line something went wrong and it got more rock than folk, and the two elements didn’t blend very well.</p> <p>“I think it took another few years before the vital ingredient came along to make it work, and that was punk rock. That had the same sort of energy that Irish folk music has. It said, stop taking it seriously ’cause it’s supposed to be fun. Stop sticking your finger in your ear.”</p> <p>And the respected Irish singer Christy Moore approves: he covered a song of the Radiators in the late 1970s, and the Pogues’ ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ on his latest album. “Christy always had a good ear for what’s going on, it doesn’t matter which strand of music of music it comes from. It was quite a radical thing to do then for a performer like Christy Moore to record what on the surface looked like a punk rock song. And to have him record ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ was like a progression of that.</p> <p>“Because the Radiators, although they never ended up sounding like the Pogues, their attitude was similar in that they were using the long standing tradition of Irish ballad writing, and playing it a different way, with an upfront energy and force, but respecting the tradition.”</p> <p>Chevron says that when he grew up in Dublin, traditional Irish music was “shoved down my throat, and I hated it. It was part of the same misguided government policy which shoved the Irish language and sport down people’s throats, to the point that all you could do was vomit it back up again. That’s the wrong way to interest people.</p> <p>“It took till that attitude cooled off a bit – for me it was a band called the Horslips, an Irish band in the 70s, who said, well fuck that, we’re gonna make this music sound like fun again. That had a big influence on me, it made it sound exciting again, and for my generation, kindled for the first time a love for Irish music.</p> <p>“Now things are more relaxed, and they don’t force music or the language on you, so it’s easier to appreciate. Though there still purists who despise what we do. But there will always be those people, always.”</p> <p><strong><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-LbkbSI5TOJk/UmJNvUGqaeI/AAAAAAAACLc/cLO4l2SBlpg/s1600-h/pogues%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="pogues" border="0" alt="pogues" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-lUCJxB-rCkM/UmJNwbpebZI/AAAAAAAACLk/zSFjNH7OqFg/pogues_thumb%25255B2%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="450" height="383" /></a></strong></p> <p><strong>ALONG</strong> <strong>WITH U2</strong>, the Pogues are known throughout Ireland. But Chevron stresses that only three members of the eight Pogues are actually Irish. “We’re a London band, all based there except for Terry who still lives in Ireland. But in London, there’s a very strong Irish music thing there in the Irish pubs. So that’s where a lot of the Pogues’ Irish music comes from, for the people who weren’t actually born in Ireland.</p> <p>“But we’ve been adopted as an Irish band in Ireland. Irish people are very proud of people who become internationally successful, particularly if they wear their Irish-ness on their sleeves.”</p> <p>Irish pub bands play in the background, “they wouldn’t have their jobs very long if they did what we do,” says Chevron. “But a lot of what those bands play, country and Irish, has some bearing on the Pogues. ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ is in that sort of mode, an Irish waltz. The pub bands play in that spirit – only we play it with a great deal more feeling than they would!”</p> <p>The Irish immigrants to America had a large influence on early country music. “And therefore rock ‘n’ roll, so it’s very integral to the way rock music turned out,” says Chevron. “It’s amazing it’s taken so long for Irish music to be this popular internationally.”</p> <p>Now the Pogues (particularly in their version of ‘Jesse James’ on <em>RSL</em>) reflect the way country has flowed back across the Atlantic. But the links go further: ‘London Girl’ thumps along with the zydeco rhythms of Louisiana. With Los Lobos, the Pogues have brought the accordion back into favour:</p> <p>“Yeah – it’s been a very underrated instrument until recently. Someone like William Schimmel who plays accordian with Tom Waits is brilliant. There are people who are using the accordian in an intelligent way these days. For a long time it had a justifiably terrible reputation.”</p> <p><strong>THE “Irish</strong> ravers” image of the Pogues has tended to obscure the fact that the band is full of excellent musicians. Shane MacGowan has done the bulk of the writing, though on the new LP <em>If I Should Fall From Grace With God</em> various members of the band contribute. “Shane’s songs are pretty hard to beat – they have to be pretty shit hot to better him.</p> <p>“Songs are everything. That’s one thing that unites us. With eight people in the band, there are lots of different influences and preferences. But we all have got great respect for the songs. The art is the songs, which I think has become grossly devalued and debased over the past few years. We’ve got production and marketing and so on, and the songs seem to have got lost. I’ve always regretted that.”</p> <p>It’s been two years since <em>Rum, Sodomy and the Lash</em>. “We’ve had a lot of problems with our record company, and it’s taken this long to iron them out. We’ve had the album recorded for quite a while, but we weren’t prepared to let them release it except on our terms. That’s been a source of great frustration for us. We’ve been playing the stuff off the album for quite a while, but it helps if people know what you’re playing. And the band is very prolific, we write a helluva lot of material, so it’s frustrating not being able to record it and get on with the next one. However it’s been worth the wait.”</p> <p><em>Fall From Grace</em> has been produced by Steve Lillywhite, and Chevron is enthusiastic about his approach:</p> <p>“Without knocking anyone else who has produced the band, they haven’t really been producers but musicians. Steve Lillywhite’s a real producer, and it’s a different discipline from being a musician, you think differently. This time the album was pretty much recorded live in the studio. We added some colouring to it afterwards, but the essence of each track is live.</p> <p>“Steve Lillywhite captured that, he didn’t impose anything on us at all, he was brilliant. He’s probably the best producer in the world — apart from his technical brilliance, he knows how to get the performance out of people. That’s what a producer should do. He hasn’t done anything to the sound that isn’t us, he’s listened very carefully to what we do and translated it onto vinyl. So it won’t sound like a Steve Lillywhite record, but like a Pogues record. I was so full of admiration for the man, on every level. He was easy going, intelligent, imaginative.”</p> <p><strong>NEVERTHELESS</strong>, the production work Elvis Costello did on RSL and the sublime EP <em>Poguetry in Motion</em> seemed sympathetic to the band. </p> <p>“Yeah, to some extent, but actually it was on that EP that things came to a head. ’Cause we had to argue for a lot of things that we felt were right, and he didn’t. So our working relationship with him soured a little bit during that. In the end we more or less got what we wanted, but we felt, it’s really stupid to have to argue with your producer about what you should sound like. There are one or two things on that EP that, quite frankly, he had a lot less to do with than his credit would suggest. Because we went away and re-did certain things after he’d finished.</p> <p>“But Elvis is a nice man, he’s a nice man to work with, but our working relationship with him came to an end there ’cause we were thinking differently about our sound. We had ambitions about our sound that Elvis felt weren’t really in keeping with what the Pogues should be doing. Our feeling was, well fuck that, ’cause we’re the Pogues, and we know what we should be doing! I think he was a bit nervous about experimentation. But around the time we made <em>Rum, Sodomy</em>, he was in tune with our ideas.</p> <p>“You see, people don’t always give the Pogues credit for invention or imagination or musical know-how really, and Elvis was slightly guilty of that in the end, I think. But we’ve never been as we’re popularly imagined. We’ve always been as ambitious musically as the circumstances would allow, and now they allow us to be as adventurous as we want. At the time of <em>Poguetry in Motion</em> it was in a state of transition. So it wasn’t entirely Elvis’s fault. I don’t want to blame him for it. It was a natural period of transition.”</p> <p>The Pogues’ music has the ability to cross over to any audience, from fans of a garage sound, country or folk, to Gaelic grandmothers.</p> <p>“Maybe it’s a lot to do with the eclecticism of the band,” says Chevron. “Irish music is very strong, but that’s only a part. There’s country, but on the new album it’ll be obvious there’re bits of jazz, Spanish music, Eastern folk music, ’60s rock — there’s a lot going on there.</p> <p>“So it’s gratifying that people who just love music love what we do. Because we obviously love music, and I think that comes across in what we play. There’s so much music that you hear now on the radio that seems so loveless, it sounds as if the people who made it don’t really care about it, maybe they care more about their haircut or their bank balance.”</p> <p>The Pogues supported U2 on many of the <em>Joshua Tree</em> dates, including Madison Square Garden. “There are people who would have us playing small pubs in London forever,” says Chevron. “But the nice thing about what we do is it seems to translate to huge audiences. We still manage to make it seem intimate. We really enjoy stadiums, but also enjoy playing small places, like recently we did a short tour of Ireland, playing in dance halls and large clubs. It was great fun.”</p> <p><strong><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-R4zPo9TV_5k/UmJNxMqPmKI/AAAAAAAACLs/G1rK-0EyZD8/s1600-h/chevron1%25255B1%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="chevron1" border="0" alt="chevron1" align="left" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-vROs9TekI0s/UmJNx3lKLhI/AAAAAAAACL0/UK44FVkYsnE/chevron1_thumb%25255B1%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="187" height="261" /></a>THE BAND HAS</strong> made a tradition, though, of returning to London each year to play St Patrick’s Day in a small venue. But now it’s a problem: “As we get bigger, St Patrick’s Day has tended to become extended because not everyone can see us. We could go and do Wembley Arena and cover most people, but what we’re doing, which is nicer, is we’re gonna have St Patrick’s Week – playing six shows at the Town and Country, holding 2000 people. St Patrick’s Week with the Pogues.”</p> <p>Perhaps you could stain the river green, like they do in Chicago.</p> <p>“I think we’ll leave that to the Americans, actually – we’re a bit more subtle about our Irishness over here.</p> <p>“The further you get away from a country, the more you celebrate your nationality, if you’re an immigrant. Sometimes it’s embarrassing, but I can understand it, ‘cause if you take this country where the Irish, alongside the Scottish, are still ... curiosities as citizens. Irish people over here are regarded by English people as one step above Asians and blacks and so on, which is all of course inherent racism. But in those circumstances where a national identity is sublimated, well then I think a slightly ... kitsch element comes out. You have to show your national identity a bit louder than you would in your own country. So I don’t really knock that sort of thing.</p> <p>“You have a lot of us over there, and a lot of us in America. There’s a song about it on the new album: ‘Thousands are Sailing.’ The economy isn’t there to sustain the population, unfortunately. The song links the new immigration with the mass immigration of the 19th Century potato famine. People are leaving at the rate of 30,000 a year, I believe, which is a lot in a population of three million.”</p> <p>But despite the dispersion forced by economics, music from the likes of the Pogues and Los Lobos means cultural identities are not forgotten, but celebrated. A last word from Philip Chevron: <br />“... Thanks very much for not asking us about drinking.”</p> <p><font size="1"><em>There is also an <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/phil-chevron-guitarist-with-the-pogues-and-foundermember-of-irelands-first-punk-band-8869806.html?origin=internalSearch">excellent obituary</a> of Chevron in the London</em> </font><font size="1">Independent. <em>Before his death, the Irish</em> Daily Mail <em>published a long interview with him. <a href="http://www.pogues.com/Print/PhilipInterview/PhilipChevronPart1page1.pdf">Page 1.</a></em><em></em><em>. <a href="http://www.pogues.com/Print/PhilipInterview/PhilipChevronPart1page2.pdf">Page 2</a>. <a href="http://www.pogues.com/Print/PhilipInterview/PhilipChevronPart2page1.pdf">Page 3</a>. <a href="http://www.pogues.com/Print/PhilipInterview/PhilipChevronPart2page2.pdf">Page 4</a>. </em></font></p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-5319647372449247962013-10-16T22:48:00.001+13:002013-10-16T22:48:03.807+13:00Heartbreak’n’Heroism<p><font size="1"><em>My review of</em> Stranded in Paradise<em> appeared in the Listener’s 50th anniversary issue, 1 July 1989. The use of a plural verb after “trivia” is surely the input of the literary editor, Andrew Mason. </em></font></p> <p><strong>STRANDED IN PARADISE: New Zealand Rock’n’Roll 1955-1988, by John Dix (Paradise Publications, Wellington, $39.95).</strong> </p> <p>NEW ZEALAND rock’n’roll, according to John Dix, began in 1955 when Johnny Copper, “the Maori Cowboy”, was asked to record Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’, then making waves in the States. Cooper couldn’t understand what the song was about, or even grasp the rhythm. His backing band of Wellington jazzers struggled to play on the beat, and Cooper muffed his lines. And when New Zealand’s first rock’n’roll record was released in October, 1955 – before anything similar had been done in Australia or Britain, claims Dix — the public couldn’t understand it either. Selwyn Toogood gave it a couple of spins on his Lever Hit Parade, but the record bombed.</p> <p>They had a go, nevertheless, and that is what this book is all about: New Zealanders struggling against the odds to express themselves. John Dix has shown the same tenacity with Stranded in Paradise. For eight years there has been talk of “the book”, with sceptics doubting it would ever appear. After the first two publishers dropped out, Dix finally published the book himself, with the aid of two friends. New Zealand’s rock industry has always been a do-it-yourself business, and this book pays tribute to the doers.</p> <p><em><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-MK2lk8x-yuM/Ul5gzgsli4I/AAAAAAAACK0/tXryFwJXshc/s1600-h/Johnny%252520Devlin%25255B5%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 6px 10px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: right; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Johnny Devlin" border="0" alt="Johnny Devlin" align="right" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-RCH9Y41OygQ/Ul5g0e_V1jI/AAAAAAAACK8/fRGrOhvOM3w/Johnny%252520Devlin_thumb%25255B7%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="288" height="237" /></a>Stranded in Paradise</em> is an encyclopedic, entertaining work, full of stories of heartbreak and heroism. The title comes from a Hammond Gamble song: “Stranded in paradise, how can a poor boy break the ice?” Tim Finn has called it “the tyranny of distance”, Dave Dobbyn a “strange itinerary”. The frustrations of isolation are the essence of the book, It begins with the first adolescent who wanted to break out of “normality” and small-town aspirations: Johnny Devlin (above). The bank clerk from Wanganui quickly went from talent shows to town hall tours, selling a phenomenal 250,000 records in a career that peaked after 12 months.</p> <p>A pattern quickly emerges: the few acts that are successful “conquer New Zealand, chalk up a few hits, and set sights further afield”. Usually on Australia, where New Zealand musicians from the Invaders to the Enz, Mi-Sex to Jenny Morris, have had considerable impact on the industry.</p> <p>Dix brings alive New Zealand in the 1950s, a stultifying world of six o’clock closing, short back’n’sides and Pat McMinn on the wireless. Devlin’s flame extinguished in 1959, the country settles back with safe Howard Morrison until the Shadows, and later the Beatles, inspire the beat boom.</p> <p>The book is full of long-forgotten bands and songs, but the period details and cautionary tales make it a very readable history. The Chicks as young teens visit their West Auckland neighbour Peter Posa for his autograph. They sing him a song, and within days are in a recording studio. The Avengers (‘Love Hate Revenge’) play a gig in Nelson on Sunday night, catch the Picton ferry to Wellington, drive to Whangarei to play on Tuesday night, then back to Lower Hutt to perform on Wednesday. The Fourmyula win a trip to Britain in a talent quest, only to find they have to play their way there – and back – on the ship.</p> <p>The trivia are fascinating. The vocalist of Simple Image (‘Spinning Spinning Spinning’) later sang with Frank Zappa. Shane (‘St Paul’) spent the 1970s in England, singing with a heavy metal band. Mr Lee Grant was born Bogdan Kominowski – we knew that – but in a Nazi concentration camp?</p> <p>Dix doesn’t pull his punches when musicians are the architects of their own downfall, succumbing to ego, drugs or, worse, a cabaret career. He has been writing about Australasian music since the 1960s, and has been in the right place often enough to give the book authenticity and energy. He’s a born raconteur, and chapters on the rise and demise of such self-destructive units as Dragon, Hello Sailor and Toy Love, to whom Dix was particularly close, are some of the best. The desultory years of the 1970s, when local pop was dominated by MOR acts and most live bands were pub residencies doing cover versions, are quickly by the post-punk resurgence in New Zealand rock’n’roll.</p> <p>Only a rock obsessive could have completed this book, with its band genealogies, obscure songs and forthright opinions. The enthusiasm is contagious, even if the fan in Dix gives his heroes – Max Merritt, Bruno Lawrence, Rick Bryant, Chris Knox – an aura of mythology, and the tabloid punchiness of the writing is sometimes over the top (Max Merritt’s Meteors were as welcome in Sydney “as a busful of lepers”; Kevin Borich’s guitar playing “bit like a Queensland crocodile”; the Rumour’s “pap had wheelchairs positively burning rubber on the way to the record stores”).</p> <p>There are hundreds of photos in the book’s 350 large glossy pages, and they’re as entertaining as the anecdotes. Devlin’s lame shirt and two-tone brothel creepers; the Invaders’ matching Fender guitars and monochrome lounge suits; Mr Lee Grant’s sideburns and turnover necktie; the La De Da’s tartan flares; Dinah Lee’s kiss-curls and Alison Durbin’s minis; winklepickers, cuban heels, stovepipes, bell-bottoms, pony tails, mohawks … not to mention Split Enz: three decades of dedicated followers of fashion.</p> <p>Recurring themes include the reluctance of New Zealand’s broadcasting media to reflect their local culture, and the bland-out that occurs when they do get involved; also the chequered history of major record labels’ contribution to local music. Despite this, the valuable appendix of New Zealand acts in the charts since 1966 is testimony to what has been achieved against the odds.</p> <p>The dominance of imported pop has stifled the creation of our own music. Pride in our culture is just something Michael Fay can exploit, and Mike Moore can market. <em>Stranded in Paradise</em> has given us our musical heritage. Let us hope that it will inspire our musicians, radio and television programmers – and their audiences – to keep on forging our own cultural identity.</p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-26189374794428179062013-10-13T17:26:00.001+13:002013-10-14T09:32:20.476+13:00Southern Moonlight 6<h5><font style="font-weight: normal">A Mississippi Journey, 1989</font></h5> <p><em>Part six of a six-part series.</em></p> <p><a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-1.html"><em>Part one</em></a><em>. </em><a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-2.html"><em>Part Two</em></a><em>. <a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-3.html">Part Three</a></em>. <a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-4.html"><em>Part Four.</em></a><em> </em><a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-5.html"><em>Part Five.</em></a> </p> <p><strong>Land of Dreams</strong></p> <p>“A boy is born / in Hard Times, Mississippi” sang Stevie Wonder in his hit ‘Living for the City’. The boy’s parents, though, probably called it Hard Times, Louisiana, if they were living there before the Mississippi River altered its course one night and changed their postal address.</p> <p>Further down the river though, the plantation owners of St Francisville, Louisiana didn’t see too many hard times. Early in the 19th century half the millionaires in the United States lived between Natchez and St Francisville. The area has the perfect soil for growing cotton because, before the levees were built, the river would flood every year and deposit new, rich topsoil on the land. The silt was just like fertiliser, and with only a couple of good cotton crops, a large plantation owner could earn a million dollars.</p> <p>“The wealth they had is unlike anything we see today,” said Will Mangham. “Four hundred slaves would be worth $1,500,000 to them as a commodity. That’s what they were, there were no questions of ethics.”</p> <p>Will was up from Baton Rouge for the day to show us St Francisville, and his speaking voice, with its relaxed rhythms and idiomatic expressions, told us that we’d crossed the boundary from Mississippi to Louisiana: we were getting closer to New Orleans.</p> <p>St Francisville is in “English Louisiana” – as opposed to the French-influenced regions. But a class consciousness comes with the name. “If your grandparents weren’t born here, you’re a newcomer. I don’t belong here, and they let me know it all the time. “</p> <p>The small town’s main attraction is Rosedown, one of the first antebellum mansions to be opened to the public. Its owner, who had 450 slaves, built it in 1835, and though the house is relatively small – 6000 square feet, compared to Longwood’s 30,000 – there was no restraint when it came to the garden.</p> <p><a href="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-lTyxiPpS-Tg/UlnZwVtdp8I/AAAAAAAACJU/XV1ICvLnxF0/s1600-h/Rosedown%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 6px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Rosedown" border="0" alt="Rosedown" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-GGLZ4OoGxx0/UlnZxYJaQHI/AAAAAAAACJc/OYsng0dTI9M/Rosedown_thumb%25255B1%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="457" height="246" /></a>Rosedown is a horticulturalist’s heaven. Its garden was inspired by those at Versailles, which was visited by the owner and his wife on their honeymoon. The 28 acres of garden are formally laid out, with a long avenue of oaks and miles of paths through forests of trees and bushes. Dotted among the ancient camellias and giant azaleas are statues, gazebos, summer houses and fountains.</p> <p>The house was spared in the Civil War because General Grant took his army up the other side of the river (though the family hid their silver in a pond). But the garden was an overgrown jungle when it was bought in 1956 by Catherine Fondren Underwood of Texas. She embarked on an ambitious programme of restoration. I asked if she was one of the Underwoods of typewriter fame.</p> <p>“No, they weren’t typewriter people,” said Will. “They were O-I-L people. Before there was Exxon, there was Esso. Before that it was Standard Oil. And before that there was the Fondren family. So no – she didn’t type.”</p> <p>Next day, we’d be in Baton Rouge, the Louisiana state capital, and I mentioned to Will that I was interested in their celebrated politicians. “Which one?” he said. “We have so many – eccentric politicians are our specialty.”</p> <p><a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-H1_R6ZWWlrk/UlnZyHmjrAI/AAAAAAAACJk/fHyHy7a4YFc/s1600-h/Baton%252520Rouge%252520Capitol%25255B2%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 6px 10px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: right; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Baton Rouge Capitol" border="0" alt="Baton Rouge Capitol" align="right" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-MVJlZZqiZtA/UlnZyrHHItI/AAAAAAAACJs/4FkneFTom9U/Baton%252520Rouge%252520Capitol_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" width="184" height="244" /></a>But the legacy of Huey P Long dominates the skyline of Baton Rouge. A bronze statue of the popular demagogue, who was Governor of Louisiana during the 1930s’ Depression, stands in front of the state Capitol building he erected while in office. Considered a modern classic, the Capitol building is a skyscraper of 34 storeys, a triumph of art deco design and a tribute to the power of Long: it took just over a year to build.</p> <p>In the opulent marble corridor on the ground floor though is evidence that not all Louisianan citizens were fond of Long’s benevolent dictatorship, corruption and nepotism. The walls are dotted with bullet holes from the day he was assassinated in 1935.</p> <p>Ira Babin was our guide, a Baton Rouge native, and with Will he shared a witty respect for its eccentricities. His grandfather was one of Long’s many bodyguards when he was shot by a local doctor. One bullet killed Long: his bodyguards responded with 32.</p> <p><a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-wjHh967bLlQ/UlnZze2-nEI/AAAAAAAACJ0/4cN47ib9Sa4/s1600-h/Huey%252520Long%25255B8%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 6px 10px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: right; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Huey Long" border="0" alt="Huey Long" align="right" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-7DpEpiNf4PQ/UlogvvpXP1I/AAAAAAAACKE/hqfIJMGQXeE/Huey%252520Long_thumb%25255B6%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="328" height="188" /></a>Ira, though, accentuates the positive when speaking of Long. He could have been singing Randy Newman’s tribute, ‘Kingfish’: “Who built the highway to Baton Rouge? / Who put up the hospital and built your schools?” One typical Huey move turned Baton Rouge into a major port: he built a low bridge over the Mississippi so no ocean-going vessels could sail any further north, and had to unload at Baton Rouge.</p> <p>Governors of Louisiana since then have continued in Long’s style. His brother Earl was committed into a mental institution by his wife during his tenure as Governor. When asked if a recent Governor was still in prison, Ira replied, “No – he’s been pardoned my dear.” A governor during the 60s, Jimmy Davis, also wrote ‘You Are My Sunshine’. “Sunshine was his horse,” said Ira. “He took him up the steps of the Capitol once and explained that Sunshine had never seen his office. Davis still sings at the First Baptist Church. He’s the only Louisiana governor in demand.”</p> <p>Ira drove us through the vast grounds of the Louisiana State University – the LSU was a pet project of Long’s, so he diverted state funds for buildings and the football team (whose supporters are “the loudest and most obnoxious in the country,” said Ira, again echoing Newman).</p> <p>At the LSU is an outdoor rural museum that shows the flipside to the plantation wealth: the slaves’ quarters. On the walls of one of the wooden cabins is an old newspaper advertisement:</p> <p align="center"><font color="#400000" face="Baskerville Old Face"><strong>PUBLIC SALE OF NEGROES</strong></font></p> <p align="center"><font color="#400000" face="Baskerville Old Face"><strong>Pay Half Cash, the Rest on a Two Year Mortgage</strong></font></p> <blockquote> <p align="justify"><font color="#400000" face="Baskerville Old Face"><strong>For sale — Two likely young Negro wenches, one 16, the other 13, both of whom have been taught and are accustomed to house duties. The 16-year-old has one eye but is a bright mulatto of mild tractable dispositions, unassuming manners and genteel appearance.</strong></font></p> </blockquote> <p>The temperature had been 105ºF when we had left Memphis; as we came south the humidity had become more debilitating. “I live for the azaleas, but the damn weather messes ’em up,” said Ira. The Spanish moss which drips like khaki lace from every tree in Louisiana wasn’t thriving that year. Was it cyclical? wondered Ira. Or the pollution?</p> <p>It was probably the pollution. The 150 mile stretch of the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is infamous. It has the nickname “Cancer Alley” because it has the highest concentration of toxic industries anywhere in the US. More than 130 major industrial plants line the banks, most of them producing petrochemical products such as plastics, pesticides and fuel oils. The toxic pollution they produce is about eight times the national average, causing abnormally high rates of cancer, miscarriages and birth defects.</p> <p>The traffic on the river was certainly building up. The <i>Mississippi Queen</i><i> </i>was now fighting for space with tow boats, barges and tankers. It was our last night on the river, and that evening I skipped dessert at the captain’s table to go up to the pilot house and see what it was like manoeuvering the boat in the dark. At the helm was Captain John Davitt, 31 years old but with a decade’s experience on the river.</p> <p><a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-rchfFobq9kk/Ulogwmw8FlI/AAAAAAAACKM/KL68pcHkNqU/s1600-h/MS%252520at%252520night%25255B3%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="MS at night" border="0" alt="MS at night" align="left" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuRzfWw7SmX8XMi1Yvy-pl-xGAszSr9BXkwEKyzOublM80MGLvEIC0kem0M7F_uKH3jMCH78oWsBoGSm0BnYncZpa9erbbrTVX6EsbuBIhrdieqTAuKm0VGPejlYa9Hxo10C-_5O1AfPxc/?imgmax=800" width="315" height="218" /></a>A powerful searchlight scanned the river in front of the boat. Lighting up the small room was a radar with a constantly changing picture of bends in the river and foreign objects. Piloting at night was no big deal, said Davitt. “You just have to use instruments. But it takes a lot of practice to get good. The radar might show an object, but is it a log or a buoy? The weather’s a big factor. In rainstorms you can’t see a thing, and squalls can send anchored ships everywhere.</p> <p>“A pilot is an expert over his route. He knows how to interpret the radar, knows the currents and the channel you’re in. The traffic here is tremendous – America is feeding the world via the Mississippi.”</p> <p>He was in constant radio contact with other vessels on the river. “I’m behind you ... I’ll stick to the left bank ... All right captain, I’ll get out of your way quick as I can.”</p> <p>“You’re always thinking ahead: where are we gonna meet? Is he big or small? Have we met before? Do you know the voice – is he any good? You have to have confidence so you don’t let another pilot put you in a tough spot. It’s easy to get rattled, like on the highway.”</p> <p>Davitt was scornful of Jonathan Raban taking on the Mississippi in a small boat (though in this stretch he hitched a lift on a tanker). “You don’t want to be out here in a small boat. There’s so much traffic, you can get run over. We can’t stop in a hurry. The current is so swift and there’s so much driftwood it can knock your engine off ... no, there’s too many good places to go, plenty of bayous and lakes ... you’d have to be nuts.”</p> <p>The river has changed since Mark Twain’s day, said Davitt, but piloting hasn’t. Twain said a pilot “was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived the earth.” You can see why the job usually passes from father to son.</p> <p>It was our last night on the boat. After dessert with my prim tablemates, we all had to go through the ritual of tipping the crew-members we had dealt with: waiters, porters, bar staff, cleaners. The tips were well deserved, it was the method that was odd: each person had to receive theirs in an individual envelope, making it embarrassing for both parties. The <em>Mississippi Queen</em> experience had been friendly but formal, in that American corporate way: that night the barmaids told me that the steamer had made an unscheduled stop after midnight earlier that week, to drop off a young male attendant who had been sacked for fraternising with the daughter of two passengers. When I finally went to my cabin, I found two glasses of liqueur on my bedside table, sickly sweet and undrinkable. An appreciated, subversive gesture – or the wrong cabin? </p> <p><a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-9Xm4QU08JsE/Ulog3Ah4fdI/AAAAAAAACKc/m8_fnSu27uk/s1600-h/image%25255B13%25255D.png"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="image" border="0" alt="image" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-t_FhE2a8WNU/Ulog4BUe_xI/AAAAAAAACKk/UQReY9WV2KM/image_thumb%25255B17%25255D.png?imgmax=800" width="457" height="321" /></a>AT FIRST LIGHT the steamboat docked at the Robin Street wharf in New Orleans. My Mississippi journey, and visit to the United States, was over. As the elderly passengers caught cabs to the French Quarter, or to the airport to fly home to the Midwest or California, I went to the Delta Queen Steamboat Company office to thank the benefactors I’d never met. They seemed amused with me: no one from so far away, with a pack full of worn out clothes, had been on the boat before.</p> <p>New Orleans has been described as an “aging courtesan, selling off her party clothes one at a time.” That’s certainly what it’s like outside of the Mardi Gras or the Jazz Festival around Easter, when the city enjoys its heritage for more than the tourist dollars it brings.</p> <p>The rest of the year, by day buskers gather in Jackson Square, running though ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ one more time for a few quarters; tired horses drag cartloads of tourists around the narrow, shabby streets of the Quarter; all the shops seem to be full of tacky souvenirs with corny slogans on a Dixieland jazz or gumbo theme. At night male visitors in town for a convention shuffle around Bourbon Street in suits, their ties unravelled and nametags still attached, taking in the journeyman bar bands or the sleazy strip shows.</p> <p>I went to stay one last night with a friend on the edge of the Garden District. The area deserves its name, being full of lovely old homes built for plantation owners who came into town with their debutante daughters for the ball season. When I’d stayed there four months earlier, a brass band of young blacks boogied their way down the street one morning in a spontaneous parade, the “second line” syncopations enticing kids out from behind the screen doors. “Oh, we don’t need a reason for a parade here,” said my host.</p> <p>The next morning she drove me to the railway station, through streets that oozed poverty: tenement buildings, deteriorating shacks. After the luxury of the <i>Mississippi Queen</i>, the train ride to New York was to be a trip back to reality: 30 hours sitting up, in a carriage not unlike the old express on New Zealand’s Main Trunk Line. As the train pulled out of New Orleans, past the fishing shacks on poles out in the middle of Lake Pontchartrain, I flicked on my radio. The song was ‘Route 66’.</p> <p>*</p> <p><em>That’s it, folks.</em> <em>I headed north on the Amtrak train to New York, a 30 hour journey that passed quickly thanks to two fascinating passengers, that are still memorable 24 years on: an academic with the nickname “Dr Death”, for that was his subject; and a fabric buyer from Virginia who was an encyclopaedia of Southern Culture almost as knowledgeable as the fat, heavy, wonderful book of that name, which I carried all the way home. Thanks again to local friends Ben Sandmel and Lorraine Achee; and Patti Young of the Delta Queen Steamboat Company of New Orleans. The journey took place in July 1989, and I wrote it at an Utiku hideaway a year later. In November 1990 the river sections of the story – parts three to six – were published in </em>More <em>magazine, edited by Shelley Clement.  </em></p> <p><iframe height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ZmFQu_8u1TU" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> <p><iframe height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/X0HLEJCgGws" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> <p><iframe height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/oGAFOz5GA8I" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-78090717842627948472013-10-12T22:05:00.001+13:002013-10-12T22:10:47.627+13:00Southern Moonlight 5<p>A Mississippi Journey, 1989</p> <p><em>Part five of a six-part series. </em></p> <p><a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-1.html"><em>Part one</em></a><em>. </em><a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-2.html"><em>Part Two</em></a><em>. <a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-3.html">Part Three</a></em>. <em><a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-4.html">Part Four.</a></em></p> <p><strong>Rebel Yell</strong></p> <p>We awoke to find the boat berthed at Vicksburg, and waves going up the Mississippi. This curious phenomenon is caused by Hurricane Chantel, blowing north from the Gulf of Mexico.</p> <p><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-QzJ9DIazYtE/UlkQVk8OgNI/AAAAAAAACG8/qdv6h1VVh4A/s1600-h/Vicksburg%252520view%25255B3%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 6px 10px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: right; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Vicksburg view" border="0" alt="Vicksburg view" align="right" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-LQmwOZk1re8/UlkQWetArEI/AAAAAAAACHE/zXWeQL0xg9Y/Vicksburg%252520view_thumb%25255B1%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="309" height="211" /></a>Vicksburg has a habit of bucking the system. Our first sight in the small city was of the mayor, helping out a visitor by breaking into his car. Although Vicksburg (pop: 25,000) is in the heart of the Deep South, its mayor Robert Walker is a black man who won by an 80 percent margin. Much of his support came from white, elderly voters.</p> <p>“Race relations are very calm here,” said our guide Stacy Douglas, with a refined Southern accent. Vicksburg has always been more easy-going than other Mississippi towns, the river saw to that. Carousing boatmen last century could always find a drink or a card game here.</p> <p>The locals even welcomed the filmmakers of <i>Mississippi Burning</i>. “They needed a liberal town,” said Stacy. “They’d been turned down in over 50 Mississippi towns.” But like post-war carpetbaggers, the outsiders were “hell to work with. Very haughty.”</p> <p>Vicksburg is a place that has always adapted to its circumstances. When the Mississippi changed its course away from the town in 1876, as it occasionally does, Vicksburg didn’t die like so many others. The locals responded by diverting the nearby Yazoo River back towards the town so the Mississippi steamboats could still visit.</p> <p>Its economy seems to be thriving while other towns in Mississippi experience recession. A disproportionate number of PhDs live there, thanks to various projects of the federal government, the city’s largest employer. The Army Corps of Engineers test everything from tidal waves and river flooding to nuclear weapons.</p> <p>Despite this, over a million tourists a year visit Vicksburg. They come to remember the Civil War. Because of its geographic location – it sits high on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi – Vicksburg played an essential role in the war. Whoever held Vicksburg had control of the river, so the battle for the town was one of the most grueling of the war.</p> <p><a href="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-Vsl-zAi0xPw/UlkQXG7ShBI/AAAAAAAACHM/vzVoe44vXlw/s1600-h/Vicksburg%252520map%25255B5%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin-left: auto; border-left-width: 0px; margin-right: auto; padding-top: 0px" title="Vicksburg map" border="0" alt="Vicksburg map" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-sOAU2mu1Q6o/UlkQX0EvxpI/AAAAAAAACHU/7wypncZOM0M/Vicksburg%252520map_thumb%25255B3%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="463" height="375" /></a>The terrain tells the story as vividly as a war gamer, and the battle is studied to this day at Westpoint. The hills around Vicksburg made it difficult to take quickly, so General Grant resorted to siege warfare. He surrounded Vicksburg with troops, dug 15 miles of trenches, and bombarded the town with cannon fire from the hills and gunboats on the river.</p> <p>For 47 days the town held on, with 30,000 Confederate soldiers defending against 75,000 Union troops. For six weeks the townsfolk lived in caves as, in Twain’s words, the “sky was cobwebbed with the criss-crossing of shells.” Eventually, after 23,000 soldiers had lost their lives, and with the town cut off from supplies, Grant starved Vicksburg into submission.</p> <p>In a cruel irony, the town surrendered on the 4th of July, 1363 – Independence Day. Vicksburg didn’t celebrate the national holiday for nearly 100 years. “It’s still not a very big day,” said Stacy. “This year the Mayor thought his councillors were going to organise it, and vice versa. So nothing happened.”</p> <p><a href="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-Rz5Tc9H-NBw/UlkQjbrNSrI/AAAAAAAACHc/MBeXjW25CLk/s1600-h/Vicksburg%252520battle%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Vicksburg battle" border="0" alt="Vicksburg battle" align="left" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-12wqSrbp29U/UlkQkVcpE0I/AAAAAAAACHk/GJRyLA-R7Xs/Vicksburg%252520battle_thumb%25255B2%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="330" height="239" /></a>Vicksburg had been a reluctant rebel in the first place, voting against Mississippi splitting from the Union, and now the town was devastated. These days the battleground surrounding the city is a lush, 1700 acre national park, with opposing trenches and cannons placed so close to each other that the soldiers could hear the conversations of their enemies at night. The horror of hand-to-hand combat is almost tangible, and it’s a shock to realise the Civil War is such recent history: the last Confederate veteran died in 1959, the year I was born.</p> <p>At the Walnut Hills restaurant lunch was served family style. The lazy Susan on the round table was groaning with plates of Southern soul food – fried chicken, okra, butter beans, black rice, coleslaw and corn bread – and as they were being passed around Stacy related some happier anecdotes from Vicksburg’s history. <a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-RYCUExFtIGE/UlkQk2owO0I/AAAAAAAACHs/y3wNTDYSuQg/s1600-h/Walnut%252520Hills%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 8px 0px 0px 9px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: right; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Walnut Hills" border="0" alt="Walnut Hills" align="right" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-oC-L6arosLc/UlkQlhqD6BI/AAAAAAAACH0/WVPcBbQoU6Q/Walnut%252520Hills_thumb%25255B6%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="222" height="155" /></a>Here, in 1894, a beverage called Coca-Cola was first bottled. And a few years later the town gave birth to the teddy-bear, after a visit from President Theodore Roosevelt. His hosts had taken him hunting, and offered him a bear cub to shoot. But it was tied to a stake, so Roosevelt declined, and a cuddly toy got its name.</p> <p>“Poor Vicksburg,” sympathise the people of Natchez, “they lost all their buildings.” Natchez, about 70 miles downriver, was left virtually untouched by the Civil War. So it has 500 antebellum homes, many of them mansions built by cotton barons who had their plantations over the river in Louisiana. Now, its main industry seems to be the Old South; it is often the backdrop to plantation mini-series on television.</p> <p>“I’m taking y’all to Auburn,” said our host Rhonda Souderes with a singsong lilt. She looks and sounds like the archetypal Southern belle. Hollywood has stereotyped the Southern accent as something crude and unsophisticated. In fact, it has countless regional variations, always sounds lyrical and often cultured.</p> <p><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-Zx2ufKfRfZY/UlkQmBkoCQI/AAAAAAAACH8/YBDLgGYuAiY/s1600-h/Auburn%25255B7%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 6px 9px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: right; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Auburn" border="0" alt="Auburn" align="right" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-gNqy4aUEFi0/UlkQmztzi_I/AAAAAAAACIE/Zpx9TnLPmJM/Auburn_thumb%25255B11%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="232" height="184" /></a>Auburn turns out to be a Southern mansion right out of another Hollywood stereotype. Built in 1807, it’s a vast red brick home, with a colonnade of four Corinthian columns, set in a garden of oaks dripping with Spanish moss. Impeccably restored and full of Regency antiques, it now functions – like many Southern mansions – as a bed-and-breakfast guest house.</p> <p>But you might be unmoved by the opulence inside: the rococo mirrors, Waterford chandeliers, Mallard four-posters. For this is the slave economy staring right at you. Auburn needed 27 servants to operate; its owner, a local doctor, also owned over a thousand slaves.</p> <p><a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-lnpIoUutHyQ/UlkQnbD2hcI/AAAAAAAACIM/hxOtDudnt9w/s1600-h/Longwood%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Longwood" border="0" alt="Longwood" align="left" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-6kfxBTRQ4UQ/UlkQoD301xI/AAAAAAAACIU/0FiWLI5v-O8/Longwood_thumb%25255B2%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="234" height="184" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkoko-OuH7crNtdKxd_SZgreHgayK7gMVwlxQN4jNu5K8QZH-H4PWfEz59GVvMF-_RYekl2os5eIknChSLHNvdFpyIrt0tuGqDSO93lvdRwWWgGspj84TNhYKBlmTOahTkh13D30Upw6G1/s1600-h/Longwood%252520interior%25255B5%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 7px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: right; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Longwood interior" border="0" alt="Longwood interior" align="right" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-ZsHxZf_ZDtg/UlkQplrJDhI/AAAAAAAACIk/DwQr7qdDK58/Longwood%252520interior_thumb%25255B3%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="229" height="185" /></a></p> <p>The wealth of the plantation elite – just a few thousand families – created an ostentatious building boom to emulate the indulgences of the European aristocracy. Another Natchez home, Longwood, almost rivals the Taj Mahal, and has a pathetic tale to match. Built by another cotton baron/doctor, it’s a six-storey castle topped by a huge turret and onion-shaped dome. It was to have 32 rooms, but only the outside and bottom floor were finished when the Civil War interrupted. The builders downed tools and headed north to join the Union army. Although the owner-was a Union sympathiser, his 23,000 acres of cotton fields were burned or confiscated during the war, and he never had the money to finish Longwood. Heartbroken, he died before the war was over, and his family lived on the bottom floor for the next 100 years.</p> <p>The history of Natchez seems to be bound up in the failings of human nature: greed, lust, racism, murder. The area’s first inhabitants, the Natchez Indians, had been slaughtered by the French, and since then the district had been fought over by the British, Spanish, and American pioneers.</p> <p>We’d been told of a famous old whorehouse called Nellie’s that sold souvenir T-shirts. Arky was keen to go there, to buy one for his wife. Rhonda wasn’t. The “historified” bar we’d expected, maybe with giftshop attached, turned out to be a rundown clapboard bungalow. Arky wasn’t shy, so I tagged along. “Y’all remember I’m on my own,” sang Rhonda, locking the car doors from the inside.</p> <p><a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-5qGoYFDhds0/UlkQq5ym5uI/AAAAAAAACIs/5O7_q-pbYS8/s1600-h/Nellies%2525201%25255B3%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Nellies 1" border="0" alt="Nellies 1" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-bjV45PP9IPA/UlkQtKl-haI/AAAAAAAACI0/ORKJ_iAtFeg/Nellies%2525201_thumb%25255B1%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="425" height="167" /></a></p> <p>We walked through a screen door into a house as cluttered as Miss Haversham’s. Sitting at a kitchen table were a large black woman and a pale, skinny white girl. Five small dogs yapped around them. All were having lunch, but the girl was in her underwear. She had peroxided hair, a large tattoo on her protruding shoulder blade, and was all of 15. “Can I help?” she said.</p> <p>As Arky paid for the T-shirt, he asked “How’s business?”</p> <p>“Oh, good,” she replied brightly. “I’m here on my own. I’ve only been here since Saturday. Two more girls are supposed to come up from Mobile tomorrow. Most of the business is selling T-shirts.”</p> <p>We could have been buying milk at a dairy, the conversation was so matter-of-fact. Later, I realised this was the place Jerry Lee Lewis sang lasciviously about in ‘Rockin’ My Life Away’. He and his cousin Jimmy Swaggart grew up across the river in Ferriday, Louisiana. It was a sad, sleazy dive, but it seemed more like real life in notorious Natchez (“a moral sty” – Twain) than the antique-stuffed mansions pretending to forget the past.</p> <p><a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-WmhlyqZIJms/UlkQ6NJT0xI/AAAAAAAACI8/MgwWO_vgJFs/s1600-h/tumblr_lo51mbKi5G1qm840io1_500%25255B3%25255D.png"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 9px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="tumblr_lo51mbKi5G1qm840io1_500" border="0" alt="tumblr_lo51mbKi5G1qm840io1_500" align="left" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-sJo9TBAvxaE/UlkQ7H4xsvI/AAAAAAAACJE/QZmC8ht38wM/tumblr_lo51mbKi5G1qm840io1_500_thumb%25255B1%25255D.png?imgmax=800" width="164" height="222" /></a>It was time for a drink, so Rhonda took us to the Old South Winery which produces Muscadine wines. The vintner, Scott Galbreath, is a retired vet and quite a raconteur. His wines were sweet and very grapey, almost like fortified Kool-Aid, and have names like “Sweet Magnolia”, “Southern Belle” and “Blue Bayou”.</p> <p>“No use calling ’em <i>Cab’nay S’vinyin</i>,” he said. “You gotta give ’em names the good ole boys can <i>pronounce.</i>”</p> <p>* </p> <p><em>The meal at </em><a href="http://walnuthillsms.com/"><em>Walnut Hills</em></a><em> restaurant, Vicksburg, was one of the best I’ve</em> ever <em>experienced, not only because the quality seesawed during the months in the US according to budget and generosity of friends. It wasn’t because it was fine dining, it was family dining, done at its finest. Luckily the establishment still survives, 24 years on. Until I find my own photos, I have borrowed the mansion photos from an excellent blog,</em> <a href="http://www.whitington.com/miss03/index.htm">Our Mississippi Vacation</a><em>, which covers much the same itinerary, only by car. Tragically, exactly a year after Arky and I visited Nellie’s to buy her famous T-Shirts, the much loved madame was </em><a href="http://www.underthehillsaloon.com/custom/webpage.cfm?content=News&id=65"><em>viciously murdered</em></a><em> by a drunk student she had turned away. For a black woman to run such a business for 60 years, right through segregation and out the other side, gives an indication how highly she was regarded in the community.</em> </p> <p>Little Brother Montgomery’s signature tune is where I first got to hear about Vicksburg; legendary Chess songwriter and bassist Willie Dixon was born there in 1915, so let’s shout out to him, also. </p> <p><iframe height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ZXcWyKWopUg" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> <p><iframe height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/UcqqyL-Y6Go" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-69146809837154751192013-10-11T21:26:00.001+13:002013-10-11T21:31:23.498+13:00Southern Moonlight 4<p>A Mississippi Journey, 1989</p> <p><em>Part four of a six-part series. </em><a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-1.html"><em>Part one</em></a><em>. </em><a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-2.html"><em>Part Two</em></a><em>. <a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-3.html">Part Three</a></em>. </p> <p><strong>Muddy Waters</strong></p> <p>Sailing down the Mississippi is like driving along an interstate highway. There is no scenery. Sure, there’s plenty of action – the produce of middle America goes by on barges the size of floating football fields; people zip around on pleasure craft – but not much to look at.</p> <p>All you can see are its uniform banks, the thousands of miles of neat levees built to save the Mississippi Valley from flood. Beyond the levees the land is flat, and covered by nondescript scrub and trees. Occasionally there is a small town, its rundown jetty a symbol of an earlier, bustling economy: but the river doesn’t stop there anymore.</p> <p>Perversely, the impact of the Mississippi is reduced by its size. It’s over a mile wide in parts, so the current, though swift, looks deceptively gentle. The drama and beauty of the world’s most famous river are hidden.</p> <p>Its colour isn’t blue but a deep tan, its muddy waters giving the great bluesman his name. The Indians called it the “Father of Waters”; the name Mississippi is thought to come from two Choctaw words, <i>missah </i>(“old big”) and <i>sippah </i>(“strong river”).</p> <p>The Mississippi formed the South, both literally and figuratively. Over eons, its tributaries took soil from the slopes of the Appalachians in the east and the Rockies in the west, from the prairies and plains, and carried it downstream to form the fertile valley and delta. Over a million tons of mud a day is deposited into the Gulf of Mexico.</p> <p align="left"><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-ql4KRIeha84/Ule2K3KTfGI/AAAAAAAACGE/EVsnkMakjRM/s1600-h/Ol%252520Man%252520River%25255B6%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Ol Man River" border="0" alt="Ol Man River" align="left" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-nMPDKJqHmH0/Ule2L-J_z0I/AAAAAAAACGM/ef5XF0IuPVQ/Ol%252520Man%252520River_thumb%25255B6%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="222" height="299" /></a>Ole Man River keeps on rolling, seemingly unchanged. Even the standard from Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1927 musical <i>Show Boat</i> has less permanence: over the years the song’s lyrics have often been toned down to make them less offensive. The original version opened with “Niggers all work on the Mississippi / Niggers all work while the white folks play.” In the next 10 years the “niggers” became “darkies” then “coloured folks”. Finally the line became: “Here we all work on the Mississippi / Here we all work while the white folks play ...”</p> <p>The Mississippi and its steamboats have, however, made many contributions to the language. “Highfalutin’” came from the fluted steamboat chimneys, which became symbols of wealth and power. The “riff-raff” were the poor immigrants who travelled on rafts, using oars called rifs. Steamboats carried live hogs onboard to be killed and cooked fresh; they were washed down before boarding and the water – hogwash – thrown out. </p> <p>For many people, their impressions of life on a paddlesteamer were formed by the 1936 film version of<i> Show Boat</i>, and the <i>Mississippi Queen</i> experience does all it can to fulfil the fantasies of its passengers. A troupe of entertainers is on board to recreate the showboat era, and their vast repertoire of musical Americana changes each night. Be it ragtime revue, Broadway extravaganza, or “radio days” big band, the music takes the passengers back to the ballrooms of their youth – all but a few are on the slower side of 70. <a href="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-2YR7x42224Y/Ule2MjsGLPI/AAAAAAAACGQ/7TyhNEoQx6k/s1600-h/Show%252520Boat%252520poster%25255B12%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 10px 10px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Show Boat poster" border="0" alt="Show Boat poster" align="left" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-VBmiq2cq75k/Ule2NgzDMfI/AAAAAAAACGc/Wvd2aH0lZAA/Show%252520Boat%252520poster_thumb%25255B15%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="234" height="347" /></a>And for those without a dancing partner, the boat provides a couple of dapper professional minglers to whisk the wallflowers onto the parquet.</p> <p>Every activity onboard maintains the theme of steamboatin’ through the South, from the Mardi Gras costume ball to Sunday’s “hymns of Dixie” non-denominational service. It’s like Huck Finn goes to <i>Hi-De-Hi. </i>And the lavish gourmet meals – available from 6.45am till midnight – also celebrate the South. The menu could be the lyrics of Hank Williams’s ‘Jambalaya’: crawfish pie, filet gumbo, Creole chicken, shrimp étoufée.</p> <p>What does all this cost? A three night cruise ranges between USD $435 and $1410, depending on your cabin. The cheapest cabin has a single bed and no window; top of the line is the “captain’s veranda suite” at the front of the boat. The longest cruise is 14 nights; to stay in the most luxurious suite for that time costs $6790.</p> <p>I had a companion on the journey down the Mississippi, an American called Arturo (“Arky”) Gonzalez. He was a travel writer – a real one – in his late 50s. Built for comfort, not speed, it was only fair that he had a cabin a couple of notches above mine. It was about time his luck changed, going by some of the anecdotes of this marvellous globe-trotting raconteur.</p> <p>In the 1950s Arky had worked at <i>Time </i>magazine with Joseph Heller, who was writing <i>Catch 22 </i>at the time<i>.</i> “One day Joe said, I’ve written a character with your name, though he’s nasty: nothing like you. D’you mind?” I said, well if the book’s a failure it doesn’t matter. But if it’s a huge success – and I want it to be – how would you feel if you knew Herman Wouk and your name was Queeg?”</p> <p>So the character became Arfy, and Arky lost his chance at infamy. Shortly afterwards though, while working at <i>Fortune</i> he had another opportunity. “Victor Lowndes asked me if I wanted to be a promo manager for a new magazine based in Chicago, with bunny ears as a logo. I said, are you crazy? Leave <i>Fortune</i> to join a new mag that might fold in a year? In Chicago? <i>With b</i><i>unny ears </i><i>as</i><i> a logo</i>?”</p> <p>Together we enjoyed the hospitality of the <i>Mississippi Queen </i>and explored the small towns that the boat stopped at on its way down the river. Once, the steamboats were vital to the survival of the isolated river towns and farms. The boats came with news, gossip, visitors, tools and luxuries; they left with farm produce, family and friends.</p> <p>“<i>The river is riz!</i>” declared a river town newspaper in the 1840s. “The boat bells are ringing, ships are loading, draymen swearing, Negroes singing, clerks marking, captains busy, merchants selling, packages rolling, boxes tumbling, wares rumbling, and everybody appears up to his eyes in business.”</p> <p>Now, the towns depend on other industries, such as tourism. But the sight of a steamboat still creates the excitement it did in Twain’s day. Leaving Memphis, the <i>Mississippi Queen </i>was farewelled by a flotilla of small boats and by crowds on the river bank, honking their car horns and waving. And every small town the boat visited – Vicksburg, Natchez, St Francisville – seemed to come alive for the day.</p> <p><a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-3HbYWLm7Rvw/Ule2Opct-nI/AAAAAAAACGk/UPUBARp8utQ/s1600-h/steamboat%25255B6%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="steamboat" border="0" alt="steamboat" align="left" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-4qRafzKvzlU/Ule2PZuK1LI/AAAAAAAACGs/vbGLrAjDtPo/steamboat_thumb%25255B3%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="312" height="204" /></a>The scene has hardly changed from Twain’s description in <i>Life on the Mississippi</i>, when the sleepy river towns shake themselves awake when a black drayman, “famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice,” notices a film of dark smoke appear above a remote point and cries “S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin’! ... The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, every house and store pours out a human contribution. In a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving.”</p> <p>Soon, the paddle steamer comes into sight on “the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun.”</p> <p>Ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, the town dies down, and the town drunkard is asleep once more. </p> <p>*</p> <p><em>The US Public Broadcasting System had an excellent series on the Mississippi called</em> <a href="http://www.pbs.org/riverofsong/music/">River of Song</a><em> – its website is still online, with a thorough explanation of the social and economic context behind the river’s connection with music. Mississippi River enthusiast Dean Klinkenberg has assembled a lengthy list of </em><a href="http://mississippivalleytraveler.com/mississippi-river-songs/"><em>river-related songs</em></a><em>. And for a novel set in the 1920s, combining the fading days of the paddle steamer with the arrival of jazz, plus a gripping tale of “guilt and vengeance”, I thoroughly recommend Tim Gautreaux’s </em><a href="http://www.pbs.org/riverofsong/music/">The Missing</a><em>. Roger Miller paid tribute to his hero Mark Twain’s</em> The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn <em>with his Broadway musical</em> Big River<em>. Here he sings one of the highlights, the moving ‘River in the Rain’.</em> </p> <p><iframe height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/6nZNwR2maas" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-79435375484347565592013-10-10T21:29:00.001+13:002013-10-10T21:33:58.291+13:00Southern Moonlight 3<p>A Mississippi Journey, 1989</p> <p><em>Part three of a six-part series. <a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-1.html">Part one</a>. <a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-2.html">Part Two</a>. </em></p> <p><strong>Ol’ Man River</strong> </p> <p>Seeing the Mississippi River for the first time is not the religious experience you might expect. In a bestselling guidebook for river traders published in 1814, Zadok Cramer wrote: “To a stranger, the first view of the Mississippi conveys not that idea of grandeur which he may have pictured to himself: his first judgment will rest upon the appearance of its breadth, in which respect it is inferior to many rivers of much less note.”</p> <p>Cramer wrote those words three years after the first steamboat had been built; I was contemplating them from my cabin in the last. “Someday,” predicted Mark Twain, “they’ll build the biggest steamboat the world has ever known, and she’ll be long, white and gleaming in the sunshine, with her twin black stacks. And that one shall be the Queen of the Mississippi.”</p> <p><a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-32OArGt6TGg/UlZlShOmQZI/AAAAAAAACFc/XJI-QpPFg8s/s1600-h/Mississippi%252520Queen%2525201%25255B7%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Mississippi Queen 1" border="0" alt="Mississippi Queen 1" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-MF7FyfwPBo4/UlZlTdFNg6I/AAAAAAAACFk/e2eujgEbunA/Mississippi%252520Queen%2525201_thumb%25255B5%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="419" height="304" /></a></p> <p>The <i>Mississippi Queen </i>became a reality in 1976. It is the largest steamboat ever built and, with the <em>Delta Queen </em>(built 1926), is one of the last two overnight paddle steamers to ply the Mississippi. Built at a cost of US $27 million, and designed by the same person as the QE2, the <i>Mississippi Queen</i> is certainly luxurious: a floating hotel for 400 guests. I couldn’t believe my luck to be one of them.</p> <p>It happened like this. Shortly after canoeing down the Wanganui River – New Zealand’s Mississippi equivalent, in legend and commerce – I had read <i>Old Glory</i>, Jonathan Raban’s eloquent account of his trip down the Mississippi in a small boat. A month later I was in New Orleans, at the start of a backpacking trip around the States, and asked Ben Sandmel, a local writer, musician and folklorist, if he knew anyone – an old pilot, maybe – I could interview for a story about the Mississippi. </p> <p>“Give this company a ring,” he had said. “They run cruises down the Mississippi on paddle steamers.” When I rang the Delta Queen Steamboat Company, a voice said, “Sure. What part of the river do you want to go on?” </p> <p>The same day, an itinerary arrived by courier. The accompanying letter read: “Your coming from one of the great maritime nations of the world gives me no surprise that you would be interested in writing a story about America’s only two overnight paddlewheel passenger steamboats.”</p> <p>Finally, after four months of sleeping on people’s floors and in crowded, often squalid hostels, I was on the <i>Mississippi Queen </i>about to cruise from Memphis to New Orleans. Although only 400 miles as the crow flies, with all the twists in the river, plus stopovers in historic towns like Vicksburg, Natchez and Baton Rouge, the journey would take a week.</p> <p>However, it would include none of the hardships encountered by Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador who in 1541 became the first European to see the Mississippi. On the <i>Mississippi Queen</i>’s top deck, beside the twin smoke stacks and calliope steam organ, was a jacuzzi; on the bottom was a movie theatre. In between were bars, a ballroom, dining room, library, gymnasium and sauna. The seven decks were trimmed with New Orleans-style wrought-iron railings, and linked by a grand staircase with brass bannisters. At the stern was the bright red steam-powered paddlewheel, 12 metres wide.</p> <p><a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-J0D79rRThP4/UlZlUI98bHI/AAAAAAAACFs/OSMrPUXisvI/s1600-h/Mississippi%252520Queen%2525202%25255B2%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 4px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Mississippi Queen 2" border="0" alt="Mississippi Queen 2" align="left" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-eG1ANrT1BAk/UlZlUwg7xWI/AAAAAAAACF0/PmZZ2yRX_ak/Mississippi%252520Queen%2525202_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" width="244" height="161" /></a>My cabin had twin beds, wide windows, its own bathroom and a private veranda. I unpacked the library I’d bought for the journey in <a href="http://www.burkesbooks.com/">Burke’s</a>, the great Memphis second-hand bookshop. Inevitably, Mark Twain’s <i>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn </i>and <i>Life on the Mississippi</i>; Raban’s <i>Old Glory</i>; the Penguin collections <i>Stories of the Modern South</i>, with work by Faulkner, Agee, Welty, O’Connor, McCullers, Capote; Bruce Catton’s <i>Short History of the Civil War</i>, and the just-published <i>Encyclopedia of Southern Culture</i>, a magnificent, all-encompassing work the size of a family Bible.</p> <p>I flicked on the radio, and heard Dwight Yoakam singing ‘South of Cincinnati’: “If you ever get south of the Mason and Dixon ...” Opening <i>Life on the Mississippi</i>, I read Twain’s introduction: “The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. “</p> <p>The place for river-buffs was at the bow of the boat, in the passenger wheelhouse. Situated just beneath the pilot house, it was a haven for Walter Mitty boatmen, with a ship’s wheel, navigating instruments and detailed charts from which to follow the boat’s journey down the river, mile by mile.</p> <p>In the pilot house above sat Captain Lawrence Keeton, a Mississippi boatman with 55 years’ experience. “I was a Huckleberry Finn guy, myself,” he said in a relaxed Southern drawl. “I grew up in Memphis, above the river, and it was my big playground. My mother would say ‘Don’t go down to the river,’ but I always did. Where we put in at Memphis was where I learnt to swim. We dug up an old rowboat there, went fishing, fooled around, like kids do.”</p> <p>Piloting is just like it’s always been, though there are more navigational aids now: channel lights, buoys (<i>boo-oys</i>), radar. When Keeton first started, there was no radar and only “dot-dash” radio. “You used natural things to help you. You’d look out for big rocks, or a special tree at the head of a bend. During World War Two there was so much traffic, they started <i>boo-oying</i> the river. Now it’s like a picket fence.”</p> <p>A lot of engineering work has been done this century to keep the Mississippi navigable. Dykes and wire-mesh coverings protect the banks from erosion. “There’s always something washing away. The dykes keep the river from being wide and shallow.” On the banks of the river there are markings to show the water level. “If you get aground on a low river, you’re in trouble. A towboat with barges can get caught for two months. And you’re paid by the mile. But if you get a running start, your barges can drag your boat over. So a lot of it’s like it used to be.</p> <p>“Sometimes people say they’ve taken all the fun out of it. But no, there’s still plenty of fun, even with all the books and notes. But time is money. If you’re doing five miles-per-hour rather than three-and-a-half, you’re using less fuel and doing more miles – so the companies encourage speed.</p> <p>“Mark Twain had a reason to race – to make time and deliver cargo. They raced to <i>get</i> their cargo. The cotton and the passengers were all lined up, waiting. That caused a lot of boats to burn up. Sparks would blow out of the stacks onto the cotton, and there’d be a fire.”</p> <p>Even today, with steel construction, fires occur. “Some of the towboats burn up. Their windows all pop out, and bulkheads warp. Just because they’re steel doesn’t mean they can’t burn. We’re very conscious of fire.”</p> <p>The pilot house is now high tech. Radar scans the river for foreign objects, a depth sounder sets off an alarm if the river gets shallower than eight feet; a radio is tuned to the Coast Guard for weather warnings and three-day forecasts from “river sages”. When Keeton first became a pilot, “We didn’t want to fool with the radios. Now you can’t get the guys off them. People help each other out here. The pilot who last went around the bend is in the best position to warn you.”</p> <p>Keeton preferred the Mississippi to the Cinncinati or Ohio rivers. “Too many locks up there. Here, it’s all open – the way I like it.”</p> <p>Rolling down the river is a mixture of freedom and familiarity. “It gets to be like walking through your house in the dark. You know where everything is.”</p> <p>*</p> <p><em>Sadly, after several owners, the Delta Queen Steamboat Company is no more, and neither is the </em>Mississippi Queen. <em>It was taken out of service in 2008, after 32 years on the river, and broken down for </em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Queen_(steamboat)"><em>scrap</em></a><em> in 2011.</em> <em>Thanks to <a href="http://www.erniek-doebook.com/about-the-author/">Ben Sandmel</a>, who is collecting awards for his recent biography of Ernie K-Doe.</em>  </p> <p><iframe height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/AXH8s7rAAKg" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-65391775946553535762013-10-09T20:41:00.001+13:002013-10-14T11:32:16.394+13:00Southern Moonlight 2<p>A Mississippi Journey, 1989</p> <p><em>Part two of a six-part series. Part one </em><a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-1.html"><em>here</em></a><em>.</em> </p> <p><strong>Memphis in the Meantime</strong></p> <p>Memphis has so much history, they don’t know what to do with it. Once the city was notorious as a rough-and-tumble frontier-town, a haven for Mississippi flatboatmen wanting to party on their way down to New Orleans. Now, immortalised for nurturing the blues and rock’n’roll, it is a musical Mecca legendary for Beale Street, the Sun Studios and Stax Records.</p> <p>Musicians around the world have sung about going to Memphis, falling in love there, leaving it, or not being able to get a f1ight.</p> <p>Chuck Berry wanted long distance information to give him Memphis, Tennessee. The Rolling Stones met a gin-soaked barroom queen there, and Little Feat a Southern belle under a street lamp. Paul Simon was drawn to Graceland. Meanwhile Bob Dylan couldn’t make it, being stuck in Mobile (Alabama) with the Memphis blues again.</p> <p>These are just the most obvious examples. But when you see the position of the city, it’s easy to understand why it’s been so romanticised. Situated just 400 miles north of New Orleans, it’s a gateway to the South, or out of it. You can get there by boat on the Mississippi, or by driving along Highway 61. Or go by rail, using the same route thousands of Southern blacks took when migrating north to St Louis and Chicago, taking their blues and jazz with them. That train is called the Midnight Special, and I feel another song coming on.</p> <p>The locals are at once bemused but respectful of their heritage. When they talk of the Elvis phenomenon, they separate the music from “the deity.” The former revolutionised the world, the latter draws 1.5 million visitors to Graceland each year. Underground musicians who revere more contemporary local heroes such as Alex Chilton relate with affection anecdotes about living legends. “I bumped into Al Green last week at Ardent Studios, talking to Willie Mitchell. Manic as ever.” “Did you hear Jerry Lee’s neighbours complained again? He keeps shooting off guns in his fancy apartment.”</p> <p>During the heyday of Beale Street, Memphis was known as the “murder capital of the US.” A police station on the street contains a museum that recalls the lawlessness that went with the saloons, casinos, brothels, and pawn shops. One gets the feeling that the only problems the police deal with now are lost tourists. For Beale Street, like much of America that has a past, has been “historified.” Anything still standing from its sordid past has received a lick of paint and a bronze plaque. There are statues of Elvis and W C Handy, and the barrooms have been renovated into chintzy but still funky juke joints.</p> <p>“It was the greatest place on earth,” said an old blues musician, “until they <i>rurnt</i> it.” But some symbols still remain untouched. Schwab’s department store is like a five-and-dime from the age when things did cost five or ten cents, and you can still find on its chaotic shelves voodoo powders, magic potions, clerical collars and handcuffs. And across the street stands Lansky’s Menswear, the place Sam Phillips of Sun Records sent Elvis Presley to learn how to dress cool (ie, like a black man). In the window are some striped winklepickers and a yellow suit with leopard skin lapels.</p> <p><a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-jlFYNHOoWFw/UlUIqq433FI/AAAAAAAACDw/_nilqAoqs7Y/s1600-h/Memphis%252520Sun%25255B2%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 7px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Memphis Sun" border="0" alt="Memphis Sun" align="left" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-Ss8D4YOaMnk/UlUIrJCZO3I/AAAAAAAACD4/3R04QkU8VYE/Memphis%252520Sun_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" width="244" height="164" /></a>On Union Avenue, a stone’s throw from the end of Beale, is Sun Studios, where the visionary Phillips made the first recordings of Elvis, Howlin’ Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Charlie Rich. The small building is once again a studio – and tourist attraction – but thankfully the people who used it for 30 years as a refrigerator repair store didn’t alter the decor. The worn lino and grimy acoustic tiles are the same ones that first heard ‘That’s Alright Mama’ and ‘Great Balls of Fire’. The curators are just as awe-struck as their visitors, for this is the sacred spot of “the rockabilly moment”, when Elvis, doodling with pick-up band, was stopped by Sam Phillips, who heard something special: “Fine, fine, man, hell that’s different! That’s a <i>pop song</i> now. That’s good!”</p> <p><a href="http://chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/search?q=graceland">Graceland</a> is a 10-minute drive south, down Elvis Presley Boulevard, and also a moving experience. The patter of the guides is sterile and bored; 4000 teary-eyed fans will pass before them today. But shuffling through the rooms stuffed with lurid furnishings and grotesque fittings, all in the best veneer money can buy, you realise Elvis simply had <i>no idea</i> – of how to handle his wealth, his fame, or his talent.</p> <p>An alternative view of Memphis is provided by the black history tour, whose militant guides give the details usually left out by the publicists. They point out a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who is revered by whites but hated by blacks. A brilliant cavalry leader who developed guerilla warfare, he later founded the original Ku Klux Klan. He also ran a slave farm, keeping his strongest slaves in cages for breeding.</p> <p>They explain why Memphis, unlike most of the other major US cities, has never had a black mayor. There is no one area of black housing, but many scattered pockets, all producing their own candidates and splitting the vote. It’s a town planning legacy of Edward H “Boss” Crump, the man who dominated Memphis politics for nearly 50 years earlier this century. Blacks were allowed to vote; Crump’s machine told them who to vote for.</p> <p>Despite the billion dollars that has been spent on redeveloping the city in the past decade, downtown Memphis has a ghostliness about it. Grand old buildings stand empty as businesses and their customers have moved out to the suburban malls. The city has turned its back on the Mississippi, once the lifeblood of its economy. Half of the US cotton crop still goes through Memphis, but it leaves by train, and the cotton warehouses facing the river are being turned into yuppie apartments.</p> <p><a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-ssTYT0bm-DQ/UlUIsCQboSI/AAAAAAAACEA/nnTpx440WeA/s1600-h/Memphis%252520Stax%25255B3%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Memphis Stax" border="0" alt="Memphis Stax" align="left" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-V4lBsFpfzvM/UlUIsofeBEI/AAAAAAAACEI/L0avWIDSHBY/Memphis%252520Stax_thumb%25255B4%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="244" height="158" /></a>Memphis morale suffered a severe blow when Martin Luther King was assassinated there in April, 1963. Up till then, the 1960s had been years of prosperity and pride, thanks to the music from Sun and Stax, and local success stories like the Holiday Inn chain and the Piggly Wiggly stores (the first supermarket was opened in Memphis, and now there’s a museum to go with it).</p> <p>“Start something great in Memphis” is the slogan of the city’s publicists, an appropriate line considering the city’s impact on Western culture. We have all, as local writer Stanley Booth points out, shopped at supermarkets, eaten at drive-in restaurants, slept in Holiday Inns, and heard blues, rock’n’roll and soul because people in Memphis found ways to convert these things into groceries. Now the city has decided tourism will be its saviour. The complex on Mud Island, with its Mississippi museum and magnificent working scale model of the river, is a step in the right direction.</p> <p><a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-weW9rYtSeoU/UlUIt8sik_I/AAAAAAAACEM/5-BDPINzyLg/s1600-h/Memphis%252520Lorraine%25255B2%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 6px 10px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: right; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Memphis Lorraine" border="0" alt="Memphis Lorraine" align="right" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-r4usDzFobRo/UlUIuimYtdI/AAAAAAAACEY/C4AxtmYbxMI/Memphis%252520Lorraine_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" width="244" height="184" /></a>I’m not so sure about the civil rights museum planned for the site of the Lorraine Motel, where King was shot. Included among its exhibits will be a laser beam display tracing the path of the bullet from James Earl Ray’s rifle to King. Protesting against the development is Jacqueline Smith, who has been camping outside for two years. She says the US$5.5 million would be better spent turning the motel into housing for the poor, or a training centre for the unemployed. “This museum is not the way Memphis should remember Dr King,” she says. “It’s nothing but a circus freak show.”</p> <p>The problem Memphis faces is living up to all its history, and making it work for the city, tastefully.</p> <p>*</p> <p align="left"><em>Twenty-four years later, this article has of course dated. Saying it had so much history, but didn’t know what to do with it, was a reflection of locals I spoke to who </em>did <em>know what the place had to offer, but despaired at the lack of initiative taken to celebrate that; or that what had been done was in a corporate way missing the soul. Since then, there has been a lot of regentrification and redevelopment of the downtown area. There are also museums devoted to </em><a href="http://www.staxmuseum.com/"><em>Stax</em></a><em> (reconstructing the original building, seen above just before it was demolished in 1989) and, on Beale Street, </em><a href="http://www.memphisrocknsoul.org/"><em>Memphis rock’n’roll</em></a><em>. Perhaps the city’s establishment and its attitude towards music and other elements of its history has changed, but race and class are barriers that don’t evaporate easily, and buildings of architectural or cultural value are always under threat. Last I heard, Jacqueline Smith was still going strong, 24 years on. </em><a href="http://historic-memphis.com/">Historic Memphis</a> <em>is an excellent non-sanitised site to explore. A pioneering alternative view of the city’s pop culture is former Shangri La Records’ proprietor Sherman Willmott’s</em> <a href="http://www.memphismagazine.com/Memphis-Magazine/August-2011/Hell-Take-You-There/">Low-Life Guide to Memphis</a><em> tours.</em> <em>Local music writer Robert Gordon is about to follow up his classic 1994 book on the city’s underground music </em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Came-Memphis-Robert-Gordon/dp/0743410459/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381303849&sr=1-1&keywords=it+came+from+memphis">It Came From Memphis</a> <em>with what is likely to be the best book on Stax, </em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Respect-Yourself-Stax-Records-Explosion/dp/1596915773/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381303849&sr=1-3&keywords=it+came+from+memphis">Respect Yourself</a>, <em>and early 1980s psychobilly star Tav Falco has written a fascinating history of lowlife Memphis,</em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Respect-Yourself-Stax-Records-Explosion/dp/1596915773/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381303849&sr=1-3&keywords=it+came+from+memphis">Ghosts Behind the Sun</a>. <em>Thanks to David Nicholson of the Memphis Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, who after I cold-called him was tireless in his efforts to help, though he probably wondered if I was legitimate. Once he heard where I was staying – a hostel that was dis-affiliated from the YHA, the owners seemed to resent the guests, and there was one toilet for 17 people – he shuddered and sorted out a room at the Sheraton, and drove me around town sharing the insights of a Brit who had lived there for eight years. The visitor’s bureau has a great website with much more </em><a href="http://www.memphistravel.com/press/home"><em>recent articles</em></a><em> on things like Memphis and <a href="http://www.memphistravel.com/press/memphis-civil-rights-story">civil rights</a>, <a href="http://www.memphistravel.com/black-history-in-memphis">black history</a>, its music legacy and <a href="http://www.memphistravel.com/press/beat-continues">current</a> status (eg Justin Timberlake, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ZdD4kh4-E">Amy LaVere</a>), its entrepreneurial history, film-making, food, bars, etc.</em> </p> <p><iframe height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/FuNKFTyT_I4" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> <p><em>It would be wrong not to include this very 80s clip of John Hiatt at Fisk University, Tennessee, with many guests including Carl Perkins, Rodney Crowell and what looks like the Jordanaires. </em></p> <p><iframe height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/OwhLdr01c6U" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-79874147777202989292013-10-08T20:56:00.001+13:002013-10-14T09:00:32.111+13:00Southern Moonlight 1<p>A Mississippi Journey, 1989</p> <p><font size="3"><strong><font size="2">Great Balls of Fire</font></strong></font></p> <p>The Devil made me do it. Or Doubting Thomas, at least. In July 1989, I was in Memphis, and the local newspaper said that Jimmy Swaggart was holding a crusade in a local venue. It was the first time the controversial evangelist had appeared in the city since his fall from grace a year earlier.</p> <p><a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-qE7jZK75yrg/UlO6k40miDI/AAAAAAAACDI/4kUzsdGxATc/s1600-h/Swaggart%2525201%25255B2%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 6px 8px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: right; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Swaggart 1" border="0" alt="Swaggart 1" align="right" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-kNEFsFO4aNA/UlO6liEvy-I/AAAAAAAACDQ/aNOnhP194yw/Swaggart%2525201_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" width="244" height="197" /></a>The leader of the Jimmy Swaggart World Ministry – which at its peak took in USD $150 million a year – had been caught in early 1988 making his regular visit to a prostitute in a New Orleans motel. “He was cheap, but he was quick,” the woman later said of her illustrious client, who never tipped or stayed more than 15 minutes.</p> <p>Swaggart was exposed by another brother of the cloth. It was an act of revenge. His accuser, a man with a rival TV ministry, had made the mistake of confessing to Swaggart of an affair with one of his flock. Swaggart passed this on to the executive of the Assemblies of God, who swiftly defrocked him.</p> <p>When Swaggart's sins came to light, the Assemblies of God executive revoked his preaching license for a year. After three months, Swaggart defied them, and returned to the pulpit. He too was defrocked, so the Jimmy Swaggart World Ministry split from the Assemblies of God to evangelise alone. Well not quite alone – 1500 people worked for Swaggart, many from the $1.5 billion World Ministry Headquarters in Baton Rouge.</p> <p>Some would say it was a just reward for Swaggart. When Jim Bakker, his main competitor in the televangelism business, had fallen amid scandal, Swaggart had damned him as “a cancer that needed to be excised from the body of Christ.”</p> <p>No one falls so heavily as a moralist caught with their pants down. But if a sinner wanted to beg for forgiveness (and money) the Lord said we must listen. It was my duty to attend the Jimmy Swaggart Crusade. I might even be saved.</p> <p>The foyer of Memphis’s Dixon-Myers Hall was lined with trestle tables covered in ministry merchandise. $40 Jimmy Swaggart Bibles. $25 “Jesus pins”. Videotapes, records, songbooks, sweatshirts. Both salespeople and customers looked like McDonald’s managers in their Sunday best: the Swaggart crusaders. </p> <p>The neatly blazered ushers told me the ground-floor was full. So I took another entrance, and found they were telling fibs. Half of the 4500 seats were empty, but I could see why they’d wanted me upstairs. The meeting was being filmed for broadcast on a Swaggart TV show, and in my day-glo striped shirt I stood out like the proverbial pork chop in a synagogue.</p> <p>The faithful seemed to be either elderly couples, with hard-bitten faces out of Steinbeck, or chubby middle-agers. Beside me was a bouffant blonde – hair and nails lacquered like Tammy Wynette – with her husband, in Elvis quiff and sideboards. There were only half a dozen blacks in the hall.</p> <p>On stage was a man in a 1940s double-breasted suit: Swaggart’s son Donnie. Before the main event, he was selling records, books and salvation. Everything seemed to be going cheap. “Prophecy packages” were down from $52 to $30, “prayer packages” from $40 to $20. It was an “urgent appeal”, with all the proceeds going “to defray the operational costs of the Swaggart child-care ministries” in Africa.</p> <p>A choir and a six-piece crusade band entered to warm up the congregation. The crowd was ready to <em>Hosanna! </em>as Swaggart entered, looking like Keith Quinn on a mission from God.</p> <p>For the first couple of hours, the crusade was more concert than church service. The music was white-bread gospel, lively as a funeral parlour, but the response was instantaneous. The congregation threw its arms in the air and cried, Amen! The rows of people started swaying, clapping in unison and stomping their feet. Hands were held aloft and eyes firmly shut as the fires of Pentecost descended, ignited with natural gas precision.</p> <p>After a dozen Christian pop songs, it was time for business. I waited for a breakout of glossolalia, but there would be no speaking in tongues tonight — Jimmy would do the talking.</p> <p>But there was a curious lack of fire and brimstone from the man who once described himself as an “old-fashioned, Holy Ghost, heaven-sent, Devil-chasin’, sin-killing, true-blood, red-hot, blood-bought, God-given, Jesus-lovin’” preacher. The soul-saving clichés rolled off his tongue, but Swaggart quickly moved to the main item on the agenda. The way to save souls was to save Swaggart’s TV “stations” (actually bought air-time on Memphis channels). They were in trouble.</p> <p>“I don’t know how much the debt is, or what the stations are called – but we need the money to keep saving souls. If you want to save souls, every dollar will go towards these stations, here in Memphis.”</p> <p>Ushers appeared with plastic buckets to pass along the rows of people who have whipped out their greenbacks. Then Swaggart upped the ante:</p> <p>“We have a gift for those who give. These beautiful family Bibles. At home we always have a Bible open on the coffee table. These Bibles will go to anyone who comes up with $100.”</p> <p>A pallet-load of silver-leafed Bibles had silently been wheeled out. Immediately a queue formed. The band was playing, the choir singing; it was communion. The faithful parted with their cheques, received a Bible, then shook Swaggart’s hand. Twenty-seven Bibles, cheques and handshakes later, the Swaggart debt was eased by $2700, not counting the plastic buckets which were filling rapidly. And this was just the first of a three-night season in Memphis. “By Sunday this place will be burning!” said Swaggart.</p> <p>He brought his wife Frances forward to do a few fundamentalist numbers. She sang about being saved, saving souls, and feeling wonderful, but her voice quickly became ragged and incoherent. So Jimmy sat down at the piano.</p> <p>He dedicated his first number to his cousin Jerry Lee Lewis, a soul certainly in need of saving. “We had dinner together last night – corn, ham, potato salad. He would have been here, but he had to go to Canada.”</p> <p>Rock’n’roll may be inviting “the powers of darkness, the demons of evil”, but Swaggart’s piano runs were straight from the Jerry Lee songbook. Soloists stepped forward from the choir: a redhead to sing country, a young black man singing gospel more like Charley Pride than Al Green. The crowd was ecstatic.</p> <p>From the piano Swaggart said, “We are all tempted by the Devil, I am, you are ...” It was an oblique reference to his disgrace, but in mid-sentence he changed tack. It could have been Jerry Lee talking: “I know there will be a journalist here, and I know what they’re going to write about me. But I want them to write about you – all your happy faces.”</p> <p>I was indeed surrounded by happy faces.</p> <p>* </p> <p><em>The first of a six-part series, written in 1990; part two is <a href="http://www.chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/southern-moonlight-2.html">here</a>. This particular part was unpublished. In 1991, two years after witnessing Swaggart’s comeback, Swaggart was caught driving on the wrong side of a Californian highway, with a prostitute as his passenger. And this syndicated story appeared in the </em>New Zealand Herald:</p> <p><a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-icHv-OutUA8/UlO6mRFceZI/AAAAAAAACDY/0g77_GfwMZ8/s1600-h/Swaggart-NZH-19917.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Swaggart NZH 1991" border="0" alt="Swaggart NZH 1991" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-u_x1n3yZBmY/UlO6nHT1_FI/AAAAAAAACDg/UWXbE6NU118/Swaggart-NZH-1991_thumb4.jpg?imgmax=800" width="317" height="222" /></a></p> <p><em>Twenty-four years on, Jimmy Swaggart Ministries prospers, its fervour undiminished. Swaggart’s official biography is <a href="http://www.jsm.org/jimmy-swaggart.html">here</a>, and an alternative one is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Swaggart">here</a>. His official TV channel the SonLife Broadcasting Network can be viewed <a href="http://sonlifetv.com/watch.html">here</a>, and illustrates the evangelical experience well. There are many Swaggart music clips on YouTube, most slow-tempo religious ballads. But for historic interest, his live-on-TV confession in 1988 is worth seeing also: </em></p> <p><iframe height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/pCpeeaIfF9c" frameborder="0" width="560" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-2544120786813388732013-06-15T13:27:00.001+12:002013-06-18T09:37:27.436+12:00Jazz Cigarettes<p><strong>1. Burnt out</strong></p> <p>It was a rock & roll moment in a country & western temple. At the country music awards in 1975, what possessed <a href="http://charlierich.com/charlierich.htm">Charlie Rich</a> to burn the envelope after announcing the winner of the big award was … John Denver? Antipathy towards Denver, or the country music industry? Sam Phillips regarded Rich as the greatest talent on Sun Records. He had spent nearly 20 years playing rock’n’roll, country, jazz and gospel piano – often in the same song – and in 1973-74 he was finally riding high, after the huge crossover success of ‘Behind Closed Doors’ and ‘The Most Beautiful Girl’. </p> <p>Now a video of that notorious TV moment has been <a href="http://www.savingcountrymusic.com/charlie-rich-burns-john-denver-at-the-1975-cma-awards">unearthed</a>, and it suggests that, rather than antipathy towards Denver, Rich was riding high on gin and tonic, as well as bitterness towards the country industry. The debate that follows this posting is worth reading, as is the take of his son, <a href="http://www.charlierichjr.com/controversy/the_envelope_burning/">Charlie Rich Jr</a>. The incident scandalised Nashville, and did Rich’s career no favours. It’s certainly hard to imagine this happening at an country awards ceremony now, though there have been those awkward Taylor Swift/Kanye West moments. And let’s not forget the notorious <a href="http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/the-listener-gofta-awards-1987-1987">Goftas</a> … </p> <p><iframe height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/krZmHCQ3l9o" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> <p><strong>2. Those young Dudes</strong></p> <p>Writing about <a href="http://www.audioculture.co.nz/people/th-dudes">Th’ Dudes</a> recently for the <a href="http://www.audioculture.co.nz/">AudioCulture</a> New Zealand music website, I came across “Th’ Dudes: Modern Music”. It was the first article In <em>Rip It Up </em>about the band, published in February 1978, before Th’ Dudes had even entered a recording studio: </p> <blockquote> <p>“We don’t want to end up as ‘old farts’,” says Dave Dobbyn. “Right now, we know that what we are doing is good, but by the time we’ve been around for a bit we’ll have lost that edge. When you’re 30 you’re finished. Even if we split now and joined other bands, those bands would not be the same or as good as Th’ Dudes.” </p> </blockquote> <p>The writer, Glenn Barclay, responds: “A bit arrogant but not totally unjustified.  </p> <p><strong>3. Pop for Potheads</strong></p> <p>A friend of mine was once at function with Paul McCartney, and got very close. “He was the coolest man in the room, and he knew he was.” Defending McCartney takes too long when talking to the narrow-minded who prefer a simple, heroes’n’villains take on music history. The Lennonists are usually unaware of the experimental side of McCartney, which often appeared on the B-sides of Wings 45s; nor have they ever suffered through the rebellious Beatle’s <em>Some Time in New York City. </em>Bill Brewster has compiled an eclectic mix tape called <a href="http://www.mixcloud.com/billbrewster/bill-brewster-presents-mccartneys-left/">McCartney’s Left: a tribute to the funkier and left-field side of Paul McCartney</a>. Why he opened with soporific ‘Waterfalls’ is beyond me, but the reggae version of Mickey & Sylvia’s ‘<a href="http://youtu.be/xQfJpQI3auw">Love is Strange</a>’ (from 1971) is curiously captivating, the epitome of his pot-for-potheads B-side style. And the slow-groove big band excursion ‘Bridge on the River Suite’ (recorded in Nashville in 1974) could be by Quincy Jones. Leaving out 1989’s dreamlike doodle ‘<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7A6E0jZRvE">Distractions</a>’ is only a slight disappointment. The person who has written most about this side of solo McCartney is Graham Reid, in his epic three-part series. The first part is called “<a href="http://www.elsewhere.co.nz/absoluteelsewhere/2529/paul-mccartney-solo-career-part-1-1970-80-success-in-the-seventies/">Success in the Seventies</a>”. I don’t agree with him about ‘<a href="http://youtu.be/pPFTvl5oGI0">Another Day</a>’ – okay, Roy Carr was right when he compared the lyrics to a deodorant commercial, but the chord changes could come from Bach’s <em>Even-Tempered Clavier. </em>The chorus is glorious, Linda included, but the pause in the verse between “bedroom” and “… chair” used to annoy the hell out of Ian Morris.</p> <p><strong>4. Tea for Texas</strong></p> <p>When I was writing the Crowded House biography <em><a href="http://crowdedhousebook.com/">Something So Strong</a></em> in 1996 it was this genre – melodic, lo-fi pop – that dominated the stereo. Simple influences, rather than elaborate competitors such as XTC or the High Llamas. McCartney’s self-titled <a href="http://youtu.be/EZ-e6y0Eyso">solo album</a> from 1970; Donovan’s greatest hits, especially ‘<a href="http://youtu.be/TY7Rxae4pjU">Riki Tiki Tavi</a>’. Top of the playlist was the Everly Brothers’ <em><a href="http://youtu.be/teeFb__ZlKw">Roots</a> </em>album. This 1968 late-career classic stands alongside <em>Sweetheart of the Rodeo </em>as a seminal influence on country-rock, with the difference – as archival audio from their childhood radio show confirms – that these were genuine roots, not affectations. Compared to the Byrds they may have looked square but musically they share the same head-space, with songs by Merle Haggard, the Beau Brummels, and Randy Newman sharing space comfortably with ‘I Wonder If I Care as Much’, ‘Living Too Close to the Ground"’ and ‘Kentucky’. The session musicians are LA’s finest, a Hollywood honky-tonk band filtered through a wah-wah. I just came across this amazing footage of the Everlys performing in Australia in 1971. The guitarist is a stunner, and the song selection shows how the brothers were trying to loosen up their clean-cut image, or reveal what was really going on backstage and after hours. </p> <p><iframe height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/tUV1-L3fy_s" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-3204583467271043172013-05-10T10:12:00.001+12:002013-06-10T12:14:41.666+12:00Never Be Blue<a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-Sv27vcuT718/UYwe-rnjqAI/AAAAAAAACAI/XYQLIbTid5U/s1600-h/image6.png"><img align="left" alt="image" border="0" height="283" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-qSJc64UGcTU/UYwfADoIT0I/AAAAAAAACAQ/Z-BUJxaJu8Y/image_thumb7.png?imgmax=800" style="background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 8px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="image" width="192" /></a><span style="font-family: Gill Sans MT;">In January 1986 in Sydney I interviewed Dinah Lee, the singer of one of the first three songs I can remember hearing (besides ‘Do the Blue Beat’, the other two are the Beatles’ ‘All My Loving’ and Nat King Cole’s ‘Ramblin’ Rose’). The interview was arranged by my friends Maxine and Bronte, who were well connected then and surely still are. It ran verbatim in the March 1986 issue of <em>Cha-Cha</em>, Auckland’s free fashion newspaper edited by the talented Ngila Dickson. Besides all the ads for Workshop and Zambesi, <em>Cha-Cha </em>ran a fascinating series of Q&A interviews that are excellent source material for social history. Among the subjects were pioneering journalist Marcia Russell, radio pirate David Gapes, broadcaster Peter Sinclair and entrepreneur Charley Gray. The two main interviewers were Wayne Washington (aka Russell Brown), and Bryan Staff. Depending on the interviewee, the tone sometimes emulated <em>Interview </em>magazine. After the interview, in central Sydney, I took her picture outside a mass-market boutique called Beatnik Girl. The thing that comes through is Dinah’s determination; 27 years later, she is still regularly performing. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Gill Sans MT;"><br /></span>
<i>“A chick-a-chick, a chick-a-chick a chang-chang!” </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Dinah Lee will always be New Zealand’s Queen of Mod. She was our first pop superstar, wowing audiences with her effervescent personality and exuberant versions of R&B hits – at a time when the Beatles were still playing Hamburg. For many of us, the 60s began with ‘Do the Blue Beat’ at the top of the New Zealand charts, and the sight of girls training their hair with Sellotape, trying to imitate Dinah’s side-curls. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Inevitably, she made the migration to Australia, where she has been based since 1964. In June last year [1985] Dinah returned to New Zealand to appear in television’s 25<sup>th</sup> anniversary concert; she will be in Auckland this month [1986] to perform at the Easter Show. “Come-on ba-by! Do-wah yakka way!”</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Mmmm I’ve been dying for this. What a good cup of coffee – some places you go and they give you little fiddly cups of cappuccino, and it’s down in a second. I’ve never got used to the heat here in Syudney. I came from Christchurch originally. I was born in Waimate – do you know where Waimate is? You do? A lot of people don’t …<br />
<br />
<i>Yes, I’ve been there. Norman Kirk’s buried there. </i><br />
<i></i><br />
Is he? In Waimate? … (looks puzzled) … I didn’t know that. <br />
<br />
<i>I’ve seen a couple your records in the second-hand stores here in Sydney – </i>Introducing Dinah Lee <i>and </i>The Mod World of Dinah Lee. <i>They’ve got very expensive prices on them. </i><br />
<i></i><br />
<a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-ZyKf-o70iSQ/UYwfBFwApfI/AAAAAAAACAY/CNmwrxAIBmQ/s1600-h/Dinah-Lee-LP3.jpg"><img align="left" alt="Dinah Lee LP" border="0" height="244" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-fX8phG_GkGY/UYwfCbLW1LI/AAAAAAAACAg/AR-dJIsNAUE/Dinah-Lee-LP_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" style="background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 8px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="Dinah Lee LP" width="244" /></a>I know, aren’t they expensive. They say they’re collector’s items now. I have a friend here who’s in a collector’s club and if I can’t find any of my singles, he’ll write all around Australia for them. I’ve got copies that way of songs I haven’t had for years, such as the songs I recorded in England, but they’re re-releases a lot of them. <br />
<br />
‘Blue Beat’ wasn’t a big hit over here [in Australia]. No, ‘Don’t You Know Yockomo’ was No 1 and ‘Reet Petite’ was No 1, but ‘blue Beat’ was only on the flipside of ‘Reet Petite’ out here. It got quite a bit of airplay in Queensland, but ‘Don’t You Know …’ is the one. A few people know ‘blue Beat’ but I wouldn’t do it in my show here, but I <i>have </i>to do ‘Yockomo’ and I <i>havae</i> to do ‘Reet Petite’, otherwise people go, “What’s happening?” But if I go to New Zealand as I did not too long ago, it’s <i>gotta </i>be ‘Blue Beat’. <br />
<br />
<i>Where did you get your material from? ‘Reet Petite’ and so on … </i><br />
<i></i><br />
That was an old Jackie Wilson song, but I found it on some album by … I can’t remember, it was so long ago … it was some girl singer doing it. <br />
<br />
‘Don’t You Know Yockomo’ was an early R&B hit as well, by New Orleans’ singer Huey Smith.<br />
<br />
<i>Were you listening to those R&B records in the early 60s? </i><br />
<br />
Oh yeah – into all that, cos it was sort of the Motown thing, and even before that there were your black singers like Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke and even Little Richard. There were lots of little coffee clubs in Auckland that people used to go to hear this music. Places like the Beatle Inn, the Shiralee, the Top Twenty … there was a jazz venue near Queen Street there, the Montmartre – I used to go in there and sing pop with a jazz band. Just piano, with slap bass and drums, and I’d sing, oh, Dusty Springfield stuff. So I had all that grounding. <br />
<a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-tshiRyqkcwo/UYwfD24GQ3I/AAAAAAAACAo/9w7kcgqbq8s/s1600-h/Dinah-Lee-and-Max-Cryer-and-Millie-S%25255B2%25255D.jpg"><img align="left" alt="Dinah Lee and Max Cryer and Millie Small Playdate 1966" border="0" height="388" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-h1Q9RufDpyo/UYwfFS--ClI/AAAAAAAACAw/6XkFjoprmsM/Dinah-Lee-and-Max-Cryer-and-Millie-S%25255B1%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; float: left; margin: 8px 10px 8px 2px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="Dinah Lee and Max Cryer and Millie Small Playdate 1966" width="317" /></a>I used to do ‘Yockomo’, ‘Reet Petite’, all those numbers, with Max Merritt and the Meteors and the Invaders even before I recorded them. We did shows all around New Zealand in the 60s with, like, Peter Posa, Lou and Simon – all these people. I don’t know if you hear of them any more … Bill and Boyd, the Howard Morrison Quartet, of course. All those people, all the time. And then I did my own shows, and shows with PJ Proby and Little Millie. <span style="font-family: Gill Sans MT;">[Millie Small is pictured here with Dinah Lee and Max Cryer, from <em>Playdate</em> magazine, 1966.]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Gill Sans MT;"><br /></span>
<i>She had ‘My Boy Lollipop’ – ‘Blue Beat’ is like an early reggae song too …</i><br />
<i></i><br />
Yeah, Jamaican ska. <br />
<br />
<i>Where did you pick that up? </i><br />
<i></i><br />
The record company [Viking] got that one for me and we just did it as we felt it should be done. Funnily enough in Australia reggae is quite big now, yet this was in the 60s when reggae wasn’t known. It’s quite unusual isn’t ‘it, how we got into reggae. I don’t know who produced that one; I’m just trying to remember … (shakes head). No, it’s just so long ago. <br />
<br />
There’s a reggae group here called the All Nighters, and a couple of years ago they did a big show up at the Tivoli and they wanted me to do ‘Blue Beat’ with them. It was great. They all loved it, because they said, “Well, you’re one of the original reggae people we know of.” You know, I never really got into reggae after that. <br />
<br />
<i>Where did you get your look from? The mod style, the haircut, the Mary Quant look – you were very early with that. </i><br />
<i></i><br />
Oh, yeah – that was mine. There was a girl in Auckland, a model called Jackie Holme – <a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-giiWQce5Zi0/UYwfHbnNF_I/AAAAAAAACA4/od-pfWbyPXk/s1600-h/image13.png"><img align="left" alt="image" border="0" height="222" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-ttJ1IczKMGI/UYwfI18IIMI/AAAAAAAACBA/R09tqr2q8CY/image_thumb15.png?imgmax=800" style="background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; float: left; margin: 8px 10px 8px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="image" width="199" /></a>she was an English lady. I used to have a bouffant haircut – the rocker image – and she just got me and cut my hair in the back of a boutique that used to be there. She cut my hair and put on all these clothes, and away I went. The whole image completely changed. Gone was the Diane Jacobs image – Dinah Lee appeared. As soon as I got this new image it was a completely new character that sort of took me over all of a sudden. It was like, “Yes, this is good … I like this … this is <i>me.</i>” <span style="font-family: Gill Sans MT;">[<a href="http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=154099">Jackie Holme</a>, a former girlfriend of Max Merritt, moved to Australia and became a top model. This image is a detail from a </span><span style="font-family: Gill Sans MT;">1969 photo</span><span style="font-family: Gill Sans MT;"> by David Mist.]</span> <br />
<span style="font-family: Gill Sans MT;"><br /></span>
<i>Did you decide to take show business more seriously then? </i><br />
<i></i><br />
Oh no. Serious? It was just a <i>hoot! </i>The madder you could look the better. We used to paint freckles on our faces and wear the weirdest clothes and the shortest mini dresses when they came out. <i>Everything</i>. Whatever hit, we got it, and we started the trends. <br />
<br />
<i>You went to England in the mid-60s and mixed with the mods there …</i><br />
<i></i><br />
I went to America first, in 1965, and then to England. I recorded <i>Shindig</i>, the television show in America, and then I did more TV and recorded some songs in England. I was on <i>thank Your Lucky Stars</i>, not <i>Ready Steady Go</i> because you had to have a hit record, it was like <i>Countdown </i>is here. I lived with Little Millie and her manager in London … <br />
<br />
<i>Didn’t Chris Blackwell manage her? </i><br />
<i></i><br />
Yes, Chris Blackwell was her manager then, and he’s still got Island records – ‘My Boy Lollipop’ was one of his first records, I think. <br />
<br />
<i>Was Blackwell doing some work for you as well? </i><br />
<i></i><br />
Yeah, he recorded me on Island. He of course had Little Millie … Jackie Wilson … Stevie Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group. I was in London through that period, meeting people like your Jane Ashers – who was going out with Paul McCartney – your Peter and Gordons and your Stevie Winwoods, Marianne Faithfull … they all used to come to the big parties we used to have. It was all Carnaby Street fashions. And then I used to have parties over here in Australia, and we used to invite all the overseas stars to them like the Byrds and the Yardbirds. Oh, just everybody that we knew back then. <br />
<br />
<i>The music industry was quite different then – less sophisticated.</i><br />
<i></i><br />
It was <i>completely </i>different<i>. </i>Then, it wasn’t a <i>business – </i>it was like a big party. Because that’s what the 60s were – it was a whole new thing. Because all of a sudden you had the introduction of English sounds and mad things and kookie things, and <i>mod.</i> You were just <i>insane. </i>They get insane now, but it’s all been done. <i>We </i>did it – back then. <i></i><br />
<i></i><br />
<i>I remember you came back to New Zealand for a visit in about 1968: your arrival was covered by the local TV news …</i><br />
<i></i><br />
During that period, of course, I did the Vietnam War twice. That was pretty horrific, but we got treated pretty well because we were entertainers. We’d do shows and have to go to hospitals and entertain people that had got blown up. I can tell you what – that was <i>hard. </i>And the first time we went up there we didn’t even have a band, we used backing tapes. The second time, I went up there with the big ABC orchestra, which was fantastic – singing rock’n’roll with a large orchestra was <i>great </i>… this was in the mid-60s. <br />
<br />
<i>In 1964 you moved to Australia. I suppose your migration was made easier than most because you’d already had a hit there.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
I remember being on a tour in New Zealand with Max Merritt and the Meteors, and all of a sudden I heard ‘Don’t You Know Yockomo’ was No 1 in Australia, and I thought, “Wow! I’ve got a No 1” – I didn’t realise till I came over here what that really meant. I mean, I <i>worked </i>when I came over here. I was lucky, I had a hit, so I didn’t have to start at the bottom. I had hit records, I did all the TV shows, bookings all the time. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-FlI8hWzWMMg/UYwfKMhcSnI/AAAAAAAACBI/ykjUz03qVaQ/s1600-h/Dinah-Lee2.jpg"><img align="left" alt="Dinah Lee" border="0" height="244" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-2H-EGTVUJhw/UYwfLsy-K_I/AAAAAAAACBQ/MnXhxIkvyec/Dinah-Lee_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" style="background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 8px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="Dinah Lee" width="143" /></a>I was working 364 days a year type of thing. Okay, the realisation now is I wish I’d known a lot more than. I mean, I was very <i>green</i> – I got ripped off a lot, which most people in the 60s did – really ripped off. I mean, I should be very very rich now – I know in New Zealand alone, ‘Blue Beat’ sold 50-60,000 copies. In New Zealand! I mean, <i>crazy</i>. And I know all my albums … it just boggles my mind to think back at what I didn’t do, because you just didn’t know anything. Nowadays you have a business manager and an accountant and a public relations person – all these people who do all that and work <i>for </i>you, but back then you didn’t – you just trusted who it was that was looking after you. <br />
<br />
It wasn’t until, like, 1970 that I realised that – hang on a minute – all these things went wrong. I’ve been making all this money – <i>where is it? </i>I got solicitors onto it, oh (sighs) we had a court case here – but a lot of things couldn’t be proved because it was just so long ago. It was only when I realised what you have to do that I started making money again – you’ve gotta do everything yourself. You’ve gotta learn, and I’ve learnt. <br />
<br />
Also I’ve learnt, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a job or you haven’t, you don’t just go for any job. You’ve still got to keep a reputation, and you don’t let anyone take you down at all. You can’t afford to – because you’ve already done that for a start. I’ve had a good past though, and without a past you can’t have a future. I’ve done a lot – and I aim to do a lot more. <br />
<br />
<i>Your popularity in Australia was across the board, wasn’t it – you were a family act. </i><br />
<i></i><br />
Yes, that’s because of the different venues. You did the rock venues and then the clubs were coming up, and to make money you did those as well. Ithink, in a way, it was a mistake that I did that – to go into that club scene. I should really have stuck to the mad rock scene. I took the safe way out. Okay, I did television and became a member of the <i>Bandstand </i>team over here – it was great career-wise, because my name was known all around Australia as it was in New Zealand. <br />
<br />
By 1969 I came back to Australia after another trip to Britain. I was working around the clubs, interstate venues, pubs, upmarket nightclubs, that sort of thing. And in ’73 I went to Mexico city and did a Las Vegas revue for six months. They billed me as the big Aussie broad – there were all these American girl dancers and I was the girl rock singer in it – that was fun. <br />
<br />
Then, back in Australia I joined up with Johnny O’Keefe – the late Johnny O’Keefe, he was to Australians what Elvis was to Americans, he was so big. We did shows all around Australia called ‘the Good Old Days of Rock & Roll’ – we put Johnny Devlin, Lonnie Lee, all these Australian people together. Cleaned up. That was fantastic, people hadn’t seen anything like it in a long time. JOK died in 1978 and I’ve been working since then doing clubs and interstate gigs. But now is the time for me to move. I’ve gotta move. <br />
<i></i><br />
<i>Doing the club circuit has meant you’ve had a long career …</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
But it was very safe, and <i>now</i> I’m looking to get out of that safe thing. I want to start all over again and do, like, <i>rock’n’roll. </i>I’ve got together with Johnny Dick, who used to drum for Max Merritt and the Meteors, and we’re now going to put together a band and just do really good rock. <br />
<br />
<i>What sort of material will you be doing? </i><br />
<i></i><br />
Oh, a couple of old numbers, but mainly contemporary, today stuff. Because here in Australia there are a few groups kicking around that are into the 50s and 60s stuff. I’ve done all that, I want to do something different. I want to do, hey, this is me, <i>now. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
I’ve recorded a song which might come out in New Zealand. It’s by an American guy called tom Scott, who was with the LA Express. It’s called ‘He’s Too Young’ – it’s about, naturally, an older woman falling for a younger guy, which is all the rage. It seems alright, I’ll see how it turns out, but I do need a record. That’s a priority. <br />
<br />
I’m going to go back to the rock scene, but in a little bit more upmarket way. I mean, Tina Turner did it. She’s come back, but she came out here a few times and did cabaret. And now she’s come back and she can do the Entertainment Centre – a bigger band, a bigger venue, but it’s still Tina Turner. That’s the same with me – I can still do it, but will do it now with a rock band, just <i>fly </i>into it. <br />
<br />
<i>Performing is something you’ll never be able to give up, isn’t it? </i><br />
<i></i><br />
No. You see, I was a pioneer in the rock industry in Australia and New Zealand. We’re a little bit funny here, they go, “Oh God, is <i>she</i> still around? She’s still alive?” People forget – or they like to think, “Oh, you’ve been up there, I want to get you back down” … you’ve just got to get up there and do it. Not <i>back </i>up there, because I don’t consider myself as ever being down, I’ve just been doing other things. <br />
<br />
You see I’m a worker, I <i>love </i>to perform and I <i>know </i>how to entertain people It doesn’t matter if you’re 18 or 80, you’ve still got to entertain people. <br />
<br />
<i>We heard news that you won a prize for body building. </i><br />
<i></i><br />
Yeah, that’s right. (laughs) Muscles – yeah, yeah (laughs). I got into that when I was about 35. As you roll along through life, you start looking at yourself and you think, now hang on a minute, you’re getting older, all these people are up and coming, you’ve just gotta start <i>taking care. </i>Cos in the 60s you just had fun – parties, booze … no drugs, cos you didn’t really know that much about drugs then. I mean the hippies were smoking pot and all that, but there were no real hard drugs. For us, bourbon and coke was like, “Wow, yeah, let’s get into bourbon and coke! And have a good time!” <br />
<br />
But as you get older, you can’t do things like that. You see what happens to everybody, and you think, I don’t want to end up looking like <i>that</i>. I love the business and I want to do things. So I started getting out on the road and did a bit of running. I ran a lamp-post and collapsed at the next one. I was so unfit! But now I’m a gym junkie – that’s it, I’m gone. If I go away for a week, I think, “Oh! What am I going to do? I’m earning all this money, but I’m doing no gym!” But the money’s quite important too. <br />
<br />
I ran for a couple of years and then I went to the gym and starting pumping iron, lifting just light weights, and I realised, I <i>like </i>this. I just went into that competition for a bit of fun, see how it went – it went well – and naturally got a lot of publicity out of it, which is great. Doesn’t hurt anybody. But I also wanted to prove that you’re not 40 and fat and forgettable. You can still say, hey, you’re a person, you’re still interesting and can still make it in what people put as a young scene. Because when you look at a lot of the big stars, even TV stars, they’re all getting on. <br />
<br />
The win [Australian Women’s Body Building Champion, Over 35] got a lot of TV coverage here – Mike Willesee and the <i>Today </i>show and lots of newspapers and magazines. It’s funny, but there are all these young people, especially young girls of 18, 19, who say, “Oh, you’re the one who won the contest.” They don’t know I’m a singer – so it’s still kept the name there, which is important these days. <br />
<br />
<i>You’re very positive about your new direction. </i><br />
<i></i><br />
You’ve gotta be, I’ve learnt that. Now I feel the time is right. Okay, I did it back then, but age <a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-nOTY-tmFrvA/UYwfNwujd4I/AAAAAAAACBY/rxKsmt2Ts0M/s1600-h/Dinah-Lee-January-1986-by-Chris-Bour%25255B1%25255D.jpg"><img align="left" alt="Dinah Lee January 1986 by Chris Bourke, Cha Cha" border="0" height="296" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-g5-YRmvSMyI/UYwfPPvFhSI/AAAAAAAACBg/dF0t7h3SPAc/Dinah-Lee-January-1986-by-Chris-Bour.jpg?imgmax=800" style="background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; float: left; margin: 8px 10px 0px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="Dinah Lee January 1986 by Chris Bourke, Cha Cha" width="204" /></a>doesn’t worry me – the people down there don’t care how old you are, as long as it’s good music. Which is great. Now there’s a trend here where they’re bringing back a lot of the older stars of the 60s. I think they’ll do it in New Zealand too, so maybe a tour, or a record – who knows? <br />
<br />
<i>How do you feel about the revival of mod fashions? </i><br />
<i></i><br />
It’s funny, because we did it and had fun doing it, and the kids of today are exactly what we were like, except it’s harder for them today – the world’s harder. But you’ve gotta have a bit of fun and that’s what we did, and sure, I think it’s fun. I have a good laugh when I see kids in their little pointy-toed shoes and mini-skirts and <i>Wow</i> – it’s just like looking at myself 20 years ago. I think, “Yeah – I’ve done that.” <br />
<br />
© Chris Bourke 1986<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Gill Sans MT;">NZ On Screen has a four-minute Dinah Lee documentary </span><a href="http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/dinah-lee-special-1965"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans MT;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: Gill Sans MT;">, which includes footage of her recording ‘Do the Blue Beat’. Meanwhile …</span><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/PrvtUxdJ9tE" width="560"></iframe>Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-14351555774797765702013-05-07T17:24:00.001+12:002013-05-14T10:33:51.306+12:00My Back Pages - 1<p><a href="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-XJ7CvktdQEk/UYiQBMODnjI/AAAAAAAAB_w/PkcikvLp2Ew/s1600-h/Fane%252520Flaws%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Fane Flaws" border="0" alt="Fane Flaws" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbguxiAc6LjFo4VNqcOw2AgoqgBHybftHBY1KIjCuRwJdoPNCCteKLOs7b0flPuDSow9K3yP7yaA7tV_vwqVFmHmcIyK7Q-DT4Jgy3K-H7fhfZYN1xNb53s5_PwygKQHMiiAUHVPM0Lcfw/?imgmax=800" width="394" height="565" /></a></p> <p>“Mike Flaws, guitarist with BLERTA, at Ngaruawahia” – from <em>Affairs</em>, February 1973. </p> <p><strong>1. The private collector</strong></p> <p>Hoarding describes someone else, someone who collects Weetbix boxes and <em>Dominion </em>newspapers and has them stacked to the ceiling in the hall. Collecting surely is a different activity, done either with a view to future value or an unspecified research purpose. Whatever the definition, they’re still in the hall, or the ceiling, or the garage, and they’re in the way. The time has come to pass on – to the tip? One hopes not – a large collection of magazines and newspapers, mostly music related, that I’ve either acquired myself or have had passed on to me by collectors of an earlier generation. In particular, there is a major stash of US <em>Rolling Stone </em>magazine from the days when they offered roach clips as subscription bonuses, when Doug Sahm or Captain Beefheart could be featured on the cover, not Miley Cyrus. Most are from the cocaine years, the 1970s. There are also its imitators: <em>Phonograph Record</em>, <em>Georgia Strait</em>, and <em>Bomp</em> from the 1970s; <em>Spin</em> from the 1980s; and the inimitable <em>Creem </em>from its heyday in the early 1970s. Offers welcome. </p> <p>Alister Taylor attempted a New Zealand <em>Rolling Stone</em>, which lasted about half-a-dozen issues in 1973. Most of the content was culled from the US edition, and they’re good issues. I don’t have those, but among many other things I have issues of <em>Affairs</em>, a short lived cultural affairs newspaper published by “Student Publications Ltd” at what was once Taylor’s address – Sydney Street West, Wellington. There is a photo spread of the Ngaruawahia festival by John Miller, Lauris Edmond on the recently departed James K Baxter, an essay by Baxter “Militancy in the Schools”, and a Jack Body essay that asks “Computers Composing Music?”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Why not? In fact there are a good many reasons why not. Nevertheless computers are used for musical composition – a paradox indeed … A computer could never compose as a human composer composes – simply because it is incapable of being irrational, moody, emotional, hard-to-get-on-with …”</p> </blockquote> <p><strong>2. The public collector</strong></p> <p>John Roberts discusses the Victoria University of Wellington’s art collection in 1988: </p> <p><font face="Century Schoolbook">There is no doubt that one painting stands out from all the others on the grounds of cost, size and standing in the artist’s achievement. This is the remarkable <i>Gate 111 </i>by Colin McCahon which, at 305 centimetres by 1071 centimetres, must be among the largest paintings permanently on display in New Zealand. The work is cognate with the famous gift to the Australian National Museum and stands as the supreme statement in McCahon’s preoccupation with this theme. It was of course a very special purchase made with the help of the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council and its value has probably increased at least twenty fold since. But the important point is that such large works, if they are not acquired by art galleries, are outside the contemplation of the private collector. Only the institutional buyer has the space and the perspective to hang them.</font> </p> <p>- from “An Institutional Collection: Victoria University of Wellington,” by John Roberts, <em>Art New Zealand </em>46<em>, </em>Autumn 1988, p71-72</p> <p>*</p> <p><em>Update: received this from Fane - </em></p> <p>Thanks Chris what a weird thing I had no idea the mag existed! I must've been having fun - all those great bands and the only things I remember about that weekend was Mammal, Corben singing bollock naked and everyone laughing at Black Sabbath burning their stupid cross! Wish I'd paid more attention!</p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-46037484772134367862013-03-07T12:33:00.001+13:002013-03-07T12:40:25.497+13:00Hanging Out with Hank<p><a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-sYVG9ZB8Y6o/UTfSSwea-4I/AAAAAAAAB_M/YMc5CnmnzFo/s1600-h/Hank%252520Williams%252520colour%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 4px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Hank Williams colour" border="0" alt="Hank Williams colour" align="left" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-XQjYKiOmOiE/UTfSTjJcNTI/AAAAAAAAB_U/5d-s0YGWMxU/Hank%252520Williams%252520colour_thumb%25255B5%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="245" height="273" /></a>In 1988 in New Orleans I met a group of men who had backed Hank Willliams (the first one). The Hackberry Ramblers were all in their late 60s, and dressed like they were going to church on a hot day: white shirts, black trousers, bolo ties, and white cowboy hats. </p> <p>What was he like? One of them answered, <font color="#0000ff">“He was always drunk as a skunk, he could hardly stand up – but when he got up on stage he sang like a hummingbird.”</font> </p> <p>Lucinda Williams’s father, the Arkansas poet and academic Miller Williams, spent time with the man himself (as well as being a friend of Flannery O’Connor). At the <em>Oxford American’s</em> blog, he recently <a href="http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2013/mar/05/poet-interview-miller-williams/">described their meeting</a>: </p> <blockquote> <p><font face="Century Schoolbook">[In 1952] I was on the faculty of McNeese State College in Lake Charles, Louisiana, when he had a concert there. I stepped onstage when he and his band were putting their instruments away and when he glanced at me I said, "Mr. Williams, my name is Williams and I'd be honored to buy you a beer." To my surprise, he asked me where we could get one. I said there was a gas station about a block away where we could sit and drink a couple. (You may not be aware that gas stations used to have bars.) He asked me to tell his bus driver exactly where it was and then he joined me. When he ordered his beer, I ordered a glass of wine, because this was my first year on a college faculty and it seemed the appropriate thing to do. We sat and chatted for a little over an hour. When he ordered another beer he asked me about my family. I told him that I was married and that we were looking forward to the birth of our first child in about a month. </font></p> <p><font face="Century Schoolbook">He asked me what I did with my days and I told him that I taught biology at McNeese and that when I was home I wrote poems. He smiled and told me that he had written lots of poems. When I said, “Hey—you write songs!” he said, “Yeah, but it usually takes me a long time. I might write the words in January and the music six or eight months later; until I do, what I've got is a poem.” Then his driver showed up, and as he stood up to leave he leaned over, put his palm on my shoulder, and said, “You ought to drink beer, Williams, ’cause you got a beer-drinkin’ soul.” He died the first day of the following year. When Lucinda was born I wanted to tell her about our meeting, but I waited until she was onstage herself. Not very long ago, she was asked to set to music words that he had left to themselves when he died. This almost redefines coincidence.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>The Nelson-born country star <a href="http://chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2008/10/singing-shooting-hypnotism.html">Tex Morton</a> also got to hang out with Hank Williams. So too did the veteran music journalist Ralph J. Gleason, who mostly covered jazz. His classic article about their 1952 meeting has a title I’ve never forgotten: <em>Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, and then God!</em> It <a href="http://www.angelfire.com/me2/kulacoco/gleason.html">opens</a>: </p> <blockquote> <p><font face="Century Schoolbook">Hank Williams came out of the bathroom carrying a glass of water. He was lean, slightly stooped over and long-jawed. He shook hands quickly, then went over to the top of the bureau, swept off a handfull of pills and deftly dropped them, one at a time, with short, expert slugs from the glass.</font></p> </blockquote> <p><iframe height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/_JQ6btrKQJM" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-63416806680996141222013-02-05T15:12:00.001+13:002013-02-07T11:27:31.635+13:00Victors and history<p><strong><a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-sW82lrPTnlM/URBqgpxAbcI/AAAAAAAAB-c/EtaSrJv0ZDw/s1600-h/Reg%252520Presley%25255B2%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 7px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Reg Presley" border="0" alt="Reg Presley" align="left" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-JDnIYTXXx_U/URBqhWvk1ZI/AAAAAAAAB-k/stGci7B1Gj8/Reg%252520Presley_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" width="179" height="244" /></a>1. </strong><strong>You make my heart sing</strong> </p> <p>Farewell, then, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/reg-presley-singer-with-the-troggs-whose-song-love-is-all-around-sold-millions-of-records-8482302.html">Reg Presley</a>, lead singer of the Troggs, a group memorable for ‘Wild Thing’ one of the great dumb songs in rock’n’roll history – a well-stocked subset – and also participant in the scatological bootleg classic, <em><a href="http://youtu.be/SrXfK9Osmvs">The Troggs Tapes</a>. </em>In this, the eloquent, lubricated group take time out in the studio to discuss how to make a hit record: “Just add some f***in’ fairy dust.” </p> <p>We can also thank the Troggs for Chris Knox’s mid-80s stint as a music critic. In <em>Rip It Up </em>he covered a late Troggs gig at the Gluepot, circa 1984-85, and described seeing Presley, his hard-working hero – aged a shocking 43, and still rocking – aprés gig in the backstage room, “fat and sweaty in his Scants”. That unforgettable image led to further work. </p> <p><em>Update</em>: In the comments, below, Joe W has written with what I’m sure is a more accurate memory of that Knox line. And I’ve changed the first link to go to the <em>Independent</em>’s obit of Presley, which shows how much more there was to him than ‘Wild Thing’. That song was written, of course, by Chip Taylor – Angelina Jolie’s uncle. Another song provided a late-career payday for Presley. I love it when that happens to songwriters. </p> <p><strong>2. Ascension Day</strong></p> <p><strong><font face="Century Schoolbook">Angel Eve “guiding Holmes through”</font></strong></p> <p>“<a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/tv/8254052/Angel-Eve-guiding-Holmes-through">He’ll be with Eve now</a>” opens an especially memorable story in the vast coverage of the recent death of broadcaster Paul Holmes. And in this morning’s <em>Herald</em>, headlined “Holmes gets haka as body heads to Auckland”, we are told that the funeral is a moveable feast: </p> <blockquote> <p><font face="Century Schoolbook">The body of Sir Paul Holmes left his Hawkes Bay home this morning in a moving ceremony that included an emotional haka. A convoy of about seven cars is taking his body to Auckland for his funeral.</font></p> </blockquote> <p><strong>3. Academic rigour</strong></p> <p><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-wKN6r5GS0vA/URBqibigi0I/AAAAAAAAB-s/cM7EfR3vLmQ/s1600-h/Nixon%25255B2%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 8px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Nixon" border="0" alt="Nixon" align="left" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-MFWiWW9EFTg/URBqjnSJPUI/AAAAAAAAB-0/b6UHjlVodyY/Nixon_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" width="150" height="244" /></a>In the February 4 <em>New Yorker</em>, Thomas Mallon writes an <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2013/02/04/130204crat_atlarge_mallon#ixzz2Jz3WWvzi">essay on Richard Nixon</a>, and his relationship with his colleagues, competitors and the media. It concentrates especially on the 1952 “Checkers” speech, in which Nixon denied inappropriate funding or gifts – apart from a coat for his wife, and the family dog, neither of which he was giving up. Mallon reviews a recent book about the speech, by Kevin Mattson: <em>Just Plain Dick: Richard Nixon’s Checkers Speech and the ‘Rocking, Socking’ Election of 1952</em> (Bloomsbury).</p> <blockquote> <p><font face="Century Schoolbook">In this new work, Professor Mattson seems to believe that he’s again playing fair, summarizing Nixon’s response to the charges as a “bizarre mix of authenticity and performance art,” but the author’s thumb is never long off the side of the scale on which he piles up evidence of Nixon’s political and personal awfulness.</font></p> <p><font face="Century Schoolbook">… Mattson makes clear from the first page of <em>Just Plain Dick</em> that he would really rather be writing a novel. “If the brain waves of Richard Nixon,” he begins, “had been read between September 18 and 22, 1952, they might have gone like this.” What follows is a four-page italicized and wholly implausible internal monologue in which Nixon sounds like a cross between Andy Hardy and Bela Lugosi. … When Mattson does consent to work within the normal confines of nonfiction, he operates like an academic with dreams of a mass audience, or, at least, the hope of receiving teaching evaluations that will commend him as an especially with-it prof.</font> </p> </blockquote> <p><strong>4. Tone Deaf</strong></p> <p>In <em>Thesis Eleven</em>, May 2007, Australian music writer Clinton Walker – who wrote <a href="http://www.plutoaustralia.com/p1/default.asp?pageId=300"><em>Buried Country</em></a>, an excellent history of Aboriginal country music – expressed his problem with academics writing about popular music. </p> <blockquote> <p><font face="Century Schoolbook">When the academy finally discovered that popular music and culture might be a useful measure of history and society, it was like a dam wall breaking. The problem was that fashionable obscurantist deconstruction became the orthodoxy. That’s why Australian music studies has given us too much information on current local hip-hop, say, because it ticks the correct boxes – post-modernism, globalism, multi-culturalism – at the expense of fast disappearing histories.</font> </p> </blockquote> <p>As a music professor friend of mine said of this species, “I looked in at one of their conferences, and it was like they weren’t talking about – or had even listened to – music at all.”</p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-74406683906162998762012-12-31T08:02:00.003+13:002012-12-31T08:02:50.690+13:00Olympian<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">James Brown at the Olympia, Paris, 1971 - the complete show, with Bootsy Collins on bass. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Aretha Franklin live in Amsterdam, 1968. </span><br />
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Monitor: <a href="http://www.openculture.com/" target="_blank">Open Culture</a>Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-495134187382205442012-12-06T15:31:00.001+13:002012-12-06T15:33:38.077+13:00From St Kilda to King’s Cross<p>Paul Kelly’s “song memoir” <i>How to Make Gravy </i>(Penguin, 2010) is as expansive and rich in gems as Australia itself. This is no conventional autobiography, and all the better for it. Written using an A-Z of his songs as its structure, it is digressive, thoughtful and honest. He is a raconteur with a sense of history and a guitar at hand to illustrate a point. </p> <p><a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-cxXjOJkdIDg/UMADYtOKO0I/AAAAAAAAB9Y/PhEleFn5z_o/s1600-h/How%252520to%252520make%252520gravy%25255B2%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 7px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="How to make gravy" border="0" alt="How to make gravy" align="left" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-znf8t79NAIM/UMADZ60BrMI/AAAAAAAAB9g/BwUfJlaklm4/How%252520to%252520make%252520gravy_thumb.jpg?imgmax=800" width="162" height="244" /></a>With maternal grandparents who were Italian opera singers, and an Irish-Australian father who was a Shakespeare-quoting friend of Don Bradman, Kelly’s love of music and story-telling combine to shape his greatest work and perhaps the most substantial and literary musician’s memoir. (Against this, Dylan’s <i>Chronicles </i>is just an aperitif). </p> <p>He talks of the joys of big families, touring the outback choking on the tales of Slim Dusty, wasting years and wasting relationships while dabbling in heroin, songwriting friends such as Dragon’s Paul Hewson and Cold Chisel’s Don Walker (“the Clint Eastwood of Australian music”), collaborations with Aboriginal musicians, a pro-active commitment to social justice, and endless summers of cricket. As asides, lyrics and lists (great opening lines for songs, a recipe for gravy, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap’s concept album). The best songs keep nagging you, “like a tongue with a loose tooth”. So does this. Two years after reading it I still don’t feel I’ve quite scraped the best bits off the pan. </p> <p>A long televised interview with Kelly, conducted by the Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster, is <a href="http://www.themonthly.com.au/how-make-gravy-paul-kelly-robert-forster-2818">recommended</a>. So too is Forster’s thoughtful essay on Kelly’s work, “<a href="http://www.themonthly.com.au/music-robert-forster-thoughts-middle-career-paul-kelly-s-quotsongs-southquot-1535">Thoughts in the Middle of a Career</a>”, written for <em>The Monthly. </em></p> <p><iframe height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9T0Q9Hsc1v0" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-89737493027246788322012-11-20T15:51:00.001+13:002012-11-20T15:51:28.023+13:00Take it to la bridge<p>Reading the London <em>Independent’</em>s fascinating obituary of French pretty-boy singer <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/frank-alamoyeye-singer-who-stormed-the-french-charts-8312522.html">Frank Alamo</a> – the leading exponent of the 1960s yéyé genre – I came across a sentence about his rivals Johnny Hallyday and Claude François. All three recorded French-language adaptations of UK and US hits, occasionally covering the same songs, eg ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. This is how the obituary described Alamo’s competitors: </p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#0000ff" face="Century Schoolbook">Hallyday, in the late 1950s, based his moody persona on Elvis Presley and the US rock’n’rollers, while François drew on James Brown and Motown and surrounded himself with dancing girls – les Clodettes, inspired by Ike and Tina Turner's Ikettes – but the clean-cut Alamo gave them a run for their money …</font> </p> </blockquote> <p>A French James Brown, go-go-ing Clodettes? I had to see this. The song I found is called ‘Belinda’. </p> <p><iframe height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/u1e7lBmiSDA" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> <p>Still, delving into old French pop singers required a nostalgic re-visit to Claude Nougaro’s ‘<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LsslgbwivY&feature=share&list=PL1DhLM4WTnvRhvfjOmh0t6HrHNgqGnQiF">Anna’</a>. </p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6681240457828598676.post-82891523661820210782012-11-06T14:53:00.001+13:002012-11-06T16:53:30.756+13:00When the day is dawning<p>‘Just a Little Lovin’ is the perfect <a href="http://youtu.be/frBuja42rqw">opening track</a> to the perfect album, <em>Dusty in Memphis. </em>Written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, it works like an overture to the 40-minute emotional opera that is Dusty Springfield’s 1969 classic. </p> <p><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-FC17-W8eIag/UJiJsHrd0VI/AAAAAAAAB84/sDPwtwk1Fww/s1600-h/Dusty%252520and%252520guitar%25255B5%25255D.jpg"><img style="background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: left; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px" title="Dusty and guitar" border="0" alt="Dusty and guitar" align="left" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-DQbA6HsIo5I/UJiJt-ZTp9I/AAAAAAAAB9A/JtszbIiKqPs/Dusty%252520and%252520guitar_thumb%25255B10%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="185" height="209" /></a>Ironically, Dusty never really recorded in Memphis. While the backing tracks were put down in Memphis at the American Studios of Chips Moman, Springfield herself was intimidated by the setting. A tormented perfectionist, she found she couldn’t record with musicians who played by ear, not using charts. Always insecure, she had her headphones turned up extremely high, as if to drown out her own voice. In 1990 <a href="http://chrisbourke.blogspot.co.nz/2008/05/everythings-coming-up-dusty.html">Springfield told me</a> (in an interview for <em>Rip It Up</em>) that hearing the producer Jerry Wexler and engineer Tom Dowd tell her, “Stand there – that’s where Aretha stood” just unnerved her. (I’ve since realised of course that Aretha never recorded at Memphis: her two classic Southern tracks, ‘I Never Loved a Man’ and ‘Do Right Woman’ were actually recorded at nearby Muscle Shoals.) So – oddly, like Aretha after her <a href="http://www.musicianguide.com/featured_biographies/pages/cmx6f40bdk/Success-at-Atlantic-Down-Alabama.html">unhappy experience</a> at Muscle Shoals – she bailed out, and recorded the final vocal tracks in New York. </p> <p>But what a brilliant song, recently revived by Shelby Lynn for her Springfield tribute album, <em>Just a Little Lovin’</em>. Is there a better opening than, “Just a little lovin’, early in the morning / beats a cup of coffee, for starting off the day…”</p> <p>This is all a preamble to a discovery recently made, of 60s bombshell Elke Sommer performing the song with a charming accent on <em>The Dean Martin Show. </em>Not so charming is the bibulous host, who undercuts any message the song has by donning his tuxedo and fleeing. Martin did have issues. </p> <p><iframe height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/WwGFHYTbqgo" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> <p>Martin himself recorded a song called ‘Just a Little Lovin’ but it wasn’t the same song. Written by Eddy Arnold, it had the sub-title “Will Go a Long Way”, and was also recorded by Ray Charles. After Springfield released the Mann/Weil classic, though, it was later recorded by <a href="http://youtu.be/N1uqAZ2tFz4">Sarah Vaughan</a> and <a href="http://youtu.be/oktGV0dk5nc">Carmen McRae</a>. Now there’s a vote of confidence in a song – and a performance. </p> Chris Bourkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00778690327406325923noreply@blogger.com0